Polonia Reformata: Essays on the Polish Reformation(s) 9783666552502, 9783525552506

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Refo500 Academic Studies Edited by Herman J. Selderhuis

In co-operation with Günter Frank (Bretten), Bruce Gordon (New Haven), Mathijs Lamberigts (Leuven), Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer (Bern), Tarald Rasmussen (Oslo), Johannes Schilling (Kiel), Zsombor Toth (Budapest), Günther Wassilowsky (Linz), Siegrid Westphal (Osnabrück), David M. Whitford (Waco)

Volume 36

Piotr Wilczek

Polonia Reformata Essays on the Polish Reformation(s)

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISSN 2197-0165 ISBN 978-3-666-55250-2 You can find alternative editions of this book and additional material on our Website: www.v-r.de  2016, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Theaterstraße 13, D-37073 Gçttingen/ Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht LLC, Bristol, CT, U.S.A. www.v-r.de All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleagues and friends with whom I have discussed, over the last twenty years, some of the ideas presented in this book. First of all I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Herman J. Selderhuis, whose inspiration and advice has meant a lot to me during our fruitful cooperation within Refo500 and RefoRC – the Reformation Research Consortium. His consent to include this book in the Refo500 Academic Studies gave me an opportunity to rethink my research ideas and purposes. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for carefully reading my manuscript and offering many insightful comments which helped me to improve my book. I must admit with regret that an attempt to take into consideration all the reviewer’s suggestions would require further extensive research beyond what is presently possible, but which I will be happy to pursue in the future in order to present some of the discussed issues from a wider perspective. My many thanks for interesting discussions about early modern religious issues go to my other colleagues from the RefoRC Board, Anne Eusterschulte, Volker Leppin, Alberto Melloni, Peter Opitz, Tarald Rasmussen, Violet Soen and Anna Vind, who, I hope, will be the first readers of this book. I wish to thank wholeheartedly Jerzy Axer, Dean of the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw, for his support and friendship. I would also like to thank very much my colleagues from the Committee on the Study of the Reformation in Poland and East Central Europe at the University of Warsaw, especially Dariusz M. Bryc´ko, Simon J.G. Burton and Michał Choptiany. Special thanks to Marilyn Burton, who has patiently corrected and improved the English of my manuscript. As Head of the Collegium Artes Liberales and Director of Doctoral Studies in the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw, I would not have enough time for my non-administrative activities without the ongoing help and support of both of my office managers, Violetta Ra˛czewska and Bogusława Rokoszewska, who deserve my enormous gratitude.

6

Acknowledgements

It is my great pleasure to mention here my colleagues who at different stages of my research and lecturing have offered their support and good advice about the problems discussed in this book: Irena Backus, Andrzej Borowski, Mirosława Hanusiewicz, Ian Hazlett, Howard Hotson, Marian Kisiel, Jan Malicki, Grantley Robert McDonald, Bronisław Misztal, Alina Nowicka-Jez˙owa, Stanisław Obirek, Mark O’Connor, Piotr Salwa, and Ewa M. Thompson. No book could be written without support from our closest circles of friends and family members who generously offer a well-wishing but realistic approach to our scholarly endeavours. I would like to thank my friends of long standing, Holt Meyer and Piotr Urban´ski, for endless telephone, Skype, Facebook, FaceTime and face-to-face conversations about life, books and ideas. I owe them a lot of encouragement and support. My heartful thanks to Krzysztof Reczka for his unlimited patience, unconditional support and unfailing friendship. I regret so much that my late, beloved parents, Jadwiga and Paweł, my grandmother Helena and my aunt Wien´czysława will not see this publication. Their support, from my early teenage years, for my involvement in early modern literature and their true interest in the results of my scholarly work will remain in my grateful memory. I was able to finish the manuscript of this book in the friendly environment of the John a Lasco Library (Johannes a Lasco Bibliothek) in Emden, my favourite home away from home, where I always return with great pleasure. Many thanks to all the Board Members for again awarding me the Hardenberg Fellowship; to the Wissenschaftlicher Vorstand of the Library, J. Marius J. Lange van Ravenswaay, for his encouragement and friendly hospitality ; to Wilko Lücht for his help in the Library ; and – last but not least – to Ewa Emery for her kind assistance, practical advice and conversations over coffee. The collection of this magnificent Library has been extremely helpful at the last stage of my work on the book. I only regret that John a Lasco (Jan Łaski), a Polish Reformed minister and theologian and one of the key figures of the European Reformation, is not mentioned in this volume as often as he deserves. Johannes a Lasco Bibliothek Grosse Kirche Emden 20 August 2015

Contents

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

5

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

11

2. Ideas and Polemics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Religion on the Periphery – the Polish Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.1 God’s Playground or the Heart of Europe? . . . . . . . . . 2.1.2 John Paul II and the Fall of Communism . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.3 The Polish Millennium (1966) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.4 The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as the European Periphery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.5 The Triumph of the Counter-Reformation on the Periphery of Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.6 Conclusions: New Challenges on the Way Back to the Heart of Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 The Polish Reception of John Calvin’s Works in the Context of the History of Christianity in Poland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.2 Calvin’s Contacts with Poland – a Bibliographical Survey . 2.2.3 Calvin’s Works Translated and Published in Poland . . . . 2.2.4 Reception of Calvin’s Thought in the Early Modern Period and Academic Publications on Calvin in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.5 Instead of a Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 The Myth of the Polish Reformation: Socinianism in Modern Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.1 Stanislas Lubieniecki’s Historia reformationis Polonicae as a Source of the Myth of the Polish Reformation . . . . . . . 2.3.2 Polish Reformation in Twentieth-Century Historiography .

15 15 15 17 18 18 20 22 23 23 24 27

30 35 36 36 37

8

Contents

2.3.3 Antitrinitarianism/Socinianism in Polish Historiography – an Evolution of Attitudes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.4 Conclusion: No Breakthrough after the Fall of Communism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 The Major Concepts of Antitrinitarian Theology in the 16th Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.2 The Bible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.3 Christology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.4 The Holy Trinity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.5 Nonadorantism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.6 Predestination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.7 Baptism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.8 Eucharist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.9 Church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.10 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Rakjw – the Capital of Socinianism: A Unique Case of European Religious Topography in the Age of the Reformation . . . . . . . . 2.6 Liber Socinianorum primarius: Introductory Remarks on the Racovian Catechism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6.2 Liber Socinianorum primarius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6.3 Bibliographical Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6.4 The State of Research and Proposals for the Future . . . . . 2.7 Debates between Jesuits and “Heretics” in Early Modern Polish Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7.1 Polemical Pamphlets of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7.2 Socinians as Principal Adversaries in Catholic Polemics . . 2.7.3 Jesuit Anti-Socinian and Anti-Lutheran Polemics – the Case of Marcin Łaszcz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7.4 A Jesuit-Socinian Debate about the Authority of the Scripture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Between Luther and Socinus: Polish Poets in the Age of the Reformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Jan Kochanowski and Polish Confessional Dilemmas in the Mid-16th Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.1 Jan Kochanowski – the Finest Poet of the Polish Renaissance: a Bio-Bibliographical Sketch . . . . . . . . . .

39 44 45 45 47 48 49 51 52 52 53 54 55 55 60 60 62 64 68 71 71 74 76 84 91

93 93 93

Contents

9

3.1.2 Jan Kochanowski’s Religion: Protestant? Erasmian? Catholic? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Erazm Otwinowski – a Biblical Poet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.1 Erazm Otwinowski – an Adventurous Traveller, Famous Scandalmonger and Modest Poet of the Church: a Bio-Bibliographical Sketch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.2 Erazm Otwinowski’s Deeds and Histories of Distinguished Women and Parables of Our Lord Jesus Christ as Poetical Transformations of the Bible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.3 The Brest Bible and other Polish Translations of the Bible in the Poetical Works of Erazm Otwinowski . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Conversion and Transformation: a Few Remarks on the Lives and Works of Polish Writers of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.1 Conversions – an Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.2 Jan Kochanowski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.3 Mikołaj Se˛p Szarzyn´ski and Erazm Otwinowski . . . . . . . 3.3.4 Kasper Twardowski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.5 Wacław Potocki . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.6 Kasper Wilkowski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

121 121 123 124 125 126 127 127

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Original Publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

129 139

Index of Persons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

141

97 103

103

107 113

1.

Introduction

In the second half of the 1990s, during my shorter and longer research stays in the United Kingdom and the United States, I realised how distorted was the image of the Polish Renaissance, Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Western scholarship and how much work still needed to be done to present the early modern culture and history of the Commonwealth of PolandLithuania to Western audiences. Certainly, a lot of research has been done in this field in the last 20 years, thanks to the tremendous efforts of scholars such as Norman Davies, David Frick, Karin Friedrich and Robert Frost, to mention only a few, whose merits are difficult to overestimate. The publication in 2015 of the first volume of the Oxford History of Poland-Lithuania, 600 pages long, written by the British historian Robert Frost, is a symbolic event, marking the new era of the presence of early modern Central European history in the English speaking world. Also in 2015, Oxford University Press published another important historical monograph, Benedict WagnerRundell’s Common Wealth, Common Good : The Politics of Virtue in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania. These books are just two current examples of how far British historiography is now from attitudes, full of prejudice, disrespect and ignorance, presented in works such as Jesuits in Poland by A. F. Pollard, discussed later in this book. The change in the British and American approach to Central and Eastern European early modern history has taken place thanks to books by the above-mentioned and many other authors, and thanks also to recent major research programs, especially two current Oxford projects – Cultures of Knowledge : Networking the Republic of Letters, 1550–1750 (conducted by Howard Hotson) and Jagiellonians : Dynasty, Memory and Identity in Central Europe (conducted by Natalia Nowakowska) – which show how intellectual, cultural and political networks worked in early modern Europe, with no division between the East and the West. Through participation in the Cultures of Knowledge project in 2009–2010 I also began a new stage in my thinking about the role of Central Europe in the international exchange of ideas in the early modern period.

12

Introduction

A general, comprehensive introduction to the issues discussed in this book is included in a few chapters of A Companion to the Reformation in Central Europe, edited by Howard Louthan and Graeme Murdoch and published by BRILL in September 2015, immediately after a manuscript of my book was sent to the publisher. The Companion is a breakthrough achievement in the long process of making Polish and Central European Reformation history and culture an equal and integral part of European history in the English-speaking world. Three chapters especially of this monumental work could be useful as introductions to the problems discussed in this book: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by Maciej Ptaszyn´ski, Antitrinitarianism by Mih#ly Bal#zs and Education: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by Michael Tworek (Louthan/Murdoch: 2015). However, there is still a lot to do in this process of presenting the “East” to the “West”, especially in the field of early modern religious studies. Quite recently there was an opportunity to discuss this issue during the preparation of a special issue of Reformation and Renaissance Review, devoted to the Brest Bible, the first Protestant translation of the whole Bible into Polish. The editors – Simon Burton and myself – were very much aware that this was the first volume in English devoted to a fundamental work of the Central European Reformation. Not only this, but we realised how distorted and full of stereotypes the image of Eastern European Reformation still is in the materials available to a non-Polish-speaking reader. Let me quote a longer passage from the Editors’ Introduction to this volume. It is a source of great satisfaction to me that these ideas were formulated during an ongoing discussion with an excellent British scholar of the younger generation, intensively involved in research on Central European Reformation history. In both Polish and Western historiography there has been a predominant tendency to read the history of the Reformation in Poland in terms of two primary, connected themes: the rise of the radical Reformation, especially the antitrinitarian and Socinian movements, and the ideal of religious tolerance. In Poland this is exemplified supremely in the works of Stanisław Kot (1885) and Janusz Tazbir (1927) as well as in what has been called the wider “philosophical historical” school which has developed around their work (Wilczek: 2013). It is characterized by a twofold historiographical strategy, as is especially manifested in Tazbir’s own work. Firstly, the Polish Reformation is stripped of all religious significance and portrayed quite simply as the cultural and political movement of a noble class (the szlachta) jealously seeking to preserve its privileges against royal and ecclesiastical interference. Secondly, the true heart of the Polish Reformation is then identified exclusively with its social and political thought. Hence, this is located variously in the “golden age” of religious freedom (c. 1540–90), the intellectual heritage of the antitrinitarian and Socinian movements and the wider cultural enrichment of Polish society (Tazbir : 1988; 1973). In this light the Polish state can be viewed not only as an exception to the inexorable and confronta-

Introduction

13

tional logic of European confessionalization, but also as an early advocate of universal religious freedom. As Tazbir evocatively put it (nicely capturing with word-play this supposed dual aspect of the Polish Reformation), sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Poland was a “state without stakes” (Tazbir : 1973). Arguably, Western scholarship has been much less willing to sever the bond between the religious and the social and political aspects of the Polish Reformation. Consequently, it has resisted better the trend to view its theological dimensions as mere epiphenomena of deeper intellectual and cultural shifts. Indeed, Western scholars have done a great deal to emphasize the theological distinctiveness of Polish Reformation thought. Yet in doing so, like their Polish colleagues, their focus has naturally gravitated towards the avant-garde views of the Polish antitrinitarians, generally at the expense of their more orthodox contemporaries. Indeed, the widespread desire to construct a “genealogy of modernity” has led to a definite prioritizing of antitrinitarianism as the intellectual mainstream of the Polish Reformation. This is hardly surprising when it is considered that it was through Kot and Tazbir in translation that previous generations of scholars first became acquainted with Polish Socinianism. In fact, until comparatively recently the standard work on the history of Socinianism was that of Kot’s translator and follower, Earl Morse Wilbur (1866–1956) (Kot: 1957; Wilbur : 1946). While the radical Reformation is no longer viewed with the same nostalgia or romanticism as it was by Wilbur and still is by Tazbir, the opinion that both it and its legacy of enlightened pluralism were “Poland’s contribution to the Reformation” remains thoroughly entrenched (Hillar: 1993). Yet, as Howard Louthan perceptively points out, to view the Polish Reformation only in terms of the impact of the radical Reformation is to gravely distort our understanding of it and its wider, European importance (Louthan: 2014). While any account of the Polish Reformation must give due place to the radical Reformation, it should not do so at the expense of the other Reformation movements that took root in Polish soil, most of them at an earlier date. As Jerzy Kłoczowski (1924–), the most eminent historian of Polish Christianity, has suggested, there is a need to view the Polish Reformation in both a broader and a longer perspective (Kłoczowski: 1988a). That is to say, the developments in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth must be seen in terms both of the wider transformations occurring in Europe’s ‘Long Reformation’ and of a truly international, trans-confessional perspective. When it comes to be rewritten, the history of the Polish Reformation must embrace multiple currents of reform and their complex, changing interaction: conciliarism, humanism, Erasmianism, Hussitism (latemedieval and early-modern), Lutheranism, the Reformed, irenicism, universal reform, Orthodox and Catholic (Counter) Reformation.What earlier scholarship saw only under a monochrome light is now being revealed more and more as a rich and colourful tapestry (Wilczek, Burton: 2015).

The present volume is designed as an attempt to present this “rich and colourful tapestry” to readers who do not speak Polish and do not read primary and secondary sources in Polish, but are interested in the early modern religious history, literature and culture of the region.

14

Introduction

This collection of essays in based on lectures, papers and chapters already presented at conferences and seminars and – in most cases – already published in English or Polish in journals and books, but not always easily accessible. I have decided to include in the present volume essays which – in most cases – have resulted from my dialogue with international audiences at conferences and seminars in the United Kingdom and the United States as well as in Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal and Switzerland. I believe that a reader interested in early modern Christianity will find in this volume ideas deserving of further debates and further research. This collection of essays is an attempt to present Polish early modern religious history and literature to contemporary readers, including general readers, not only specialists in these fields. My ambition has long been to introduce these issues from a new perspective and to emphasise the great role of Polish radical Reformation in European intellectual life, but at the same time to present the variety of religious experiences in early modern Poland and also in later periods, up to the 20th century. I very much hope to abolish certain myths about Polish Reformation history which have been present in European historiography at least since the publication of Stanislas Lubieniecki’s Historia Reformationis Polonicae (cf. Lubieniecki: 1685). In the second part of the book, two case studies on Polish Renaissance writers will be presented. The first of these writers is Jan Kochanowski, probably a Lutheran in his youth and an Erasmian Catholic later in life. His ambiguous religious views, deeply rooted in European intellectual debates, will be discussed in detail. The second author is Erazm Otwinowski, the finest Polish-language poet in the community of the Polish Brethren (antitrinitarians/Socinians). The biblical roots of this theologically radical poetry will be presented in two chapters of this book. There is an urgent need to present Polish-Lithuanian early modern religious history and literature to Western audiences from a new perspective, taking into account broader European contexts that played an important role in the development of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Central and Eastern Europe. I hope that this book will be useful for many readers interested in early modern religion, culture, literature and history.

2.

Ideas and Polemics

2.1

Religion on the Periphery – the Polish Case

2.1.1 God’s Playground or the Heart of Europe? In 1984 Oxford University Press published a book by a renowned British historian, Norman Davies, entitled Heart of Europe. A Short History of Poland. The “heart of Europe” is a surprising metaphor. The subtitle of his previous, twovolume book on Polish history, God’s Playground, would look more appropriate on the cover of a Polish history textbook. As Davies himself observed: The subtitle of this study – “God’s Playground” – may raise some eyebrows. It is one of several possible English translations of an old Polish phrase, Boz˙e Igrzysko which first appears in the 1580s as the title of Kochanowski’s verse Człowiek – Boz˙e Igrzysko (Mankind – Bauble of the Gods) […]. Boz˙e, meaning ‘divine’, refers in a pagan context to the “Gods”, and in a Christian context to “God”. Igrzysko […] can be […] translated […] as “the stage” or “playground” (where things are played). In this […] sense, it recurs at several points in Polish literature, and can be aptly used as an epithet for a country where fate has frequently played mischievous tricks, and where a lively sense of humour has always formed an essential item of equipment in the national survival kit (Davies: 2005).

This explanation sounds convincing. The “heart of Europe” is, however, as I have just said, a surprising metaphor. Of course, it all depends on whether we look at the notion of Europe from a geographical, historical, political or cultural point of view. The debates about the geographical midpoint of Europe have a long tradition, and there is even a separate Wikipedia article about the Geographical midpoint of Europe with a detailed discussion about the location of this midpoint, which depends on the definition of the borders of Europe. Of course, when we discuss such an issue from a geographical perspective, the centre of Europe is likely to be in Poland:

16

Ideas and Polemics

The first official declaration of the Centre of Europe was made in 1775 by the Polish royal astronomer and cartographer Szymon Antoni Sobiekrajski, and calculated to be in the town Suchowola near Białystok in nowadays north-eastern Poland. The method used was that of calculating equal distances from the extreme points of Europe: in Portugal (W) vs. Central Ural (E), in Norway (N) vs. Southern Greece (S) (islands were not taken into consideration) (GEOGRAPHICAL: 2015).

The idea that the centre of Europe is located not even in central but in northeastern Poland, even if correct from a geographical point of view, seems completely irrelevant for anyone except geographers. From the point of view of political and cultural history and the history of ideas, such a concept sounds awkward and nationalistic. Norman Davies used it, however, in a history textbook written in the midst of the Polish crisis of the early 1980s when the eyes of international observers were focused on Poland as a “playground” in which politicians, generals, spies and diplomats played a decisive game. In 1980–81 the Solidarity revolution was taking place and was brutally interrupted in December 1981 by a military overthrow. The book was sent to the publisher in March 1983 when the military junta still ruled the country ; martial law was officially abolished in 1984 but Poland had to wait another five years until the fall of Communism and the first partly free elections took place. In such an atmosphere Davies, a devout admirer of Poland, evoked a Polish, nationalistic and Romantic myth rather than the complicated calculations of geographers and mathematicians. As he himself recalled in March 1983: The title, Heart of Europe, suggested itself during the writing of the final sections of the book, when the depth of the Polish tragedy and the mortal dangers of the present crisis made themselves felt with mounting urgency. The image of Poland as one of our continent’s vital organs, traditionally the home of our most intimate feelings and emotions, seemed particularly appropriate. What is more it coincided most happily with the Catholic symbol of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which is widely revered in Poland, and whose official recognition by the Vatican in 1765 was granted largely in response to the petitions of Polish religious orders. On investigation, the title also matched Poland’s geographical location in the dead centre of Europe […]. Of course, it turned out the idea was anything but original. As long ago as 1836, Juliusz Slowacki [a famous Polish Romantic poet] had elaborated the metaphor in a much more elegant and ironic fashion: Jes´li Europa jest nimfa˛ — Neapol Jest nimfy okiem błe˛kitnem — Warszawa Sercem — cierniami w nodze Sewastopol, Azow, Odessa, Petersburg, Mitawa — Paryz˙ jej głowa˛ — a Londyn kołnierzem Nakrochmalonym — a zas´ Rzym… szkaplerzem.

Religion on the Periphery – the Polish Case

17

If Europe is a Nymph, then Naples is the nymph’s bright-blue eye – Warsaw is her heart, whilst Sevastopol, Azov, Odessa, Petersburg, and Mittau are the sharp points of her feet. Paris is her head – London her starched collar – and Rome her boney shoulder. Obviously, in the bitter aftermath of the [1830] November Rising, when Slowacki had taken refuge in southern Italy and when the Vatican had turned its back on Poland’s troubles together with the Western powers, the poet resented the aloofness of Poland’s faint-hearted friends almost as keenly as the heavy-footed oppression of the Russians. That thought is not original either (Davies: 1989).

It is very significant that in this passage from the preface to the hardback edition of the book Norman Davies twice refers to Catholicism – first, to the symbol of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and second, to the unfriendly policy of the Vatican towards Polish uprisings against Russia in the 19th century, under partitions, when Poland was no longer on the map of Europe. Let us now turn our attention to three significant examples of Polish religious history, associated with the role of the church. These will be discussed in reverse chronological order.

2.1.2 John Paul II and the Fall of Communism The role of Catholicism in Polish history has always been of vital importance. It was especially evident in 1983, when all key figures in world politics knew well that – despite what had happened in the mid-19th century – the metaphorical heart of Poland was in the Vatican, and that Pope John Paul II, since his election in 1978, had played an instrumental role in Polish transformation. His triumphant pilgrimage to Poland in 1979 obviously encouraged the people to act together, inspired the birth of the Solidarity movement in 1980 and gave strength to its development. Undoubtedly in August 1980 the heart of Europe was in the Gdansk shipyard. The Pope’s and the local Catholic Church’s support for the anti-Communist opposition, together with the activities of skilful Vatican diplomats, influenced the demolition of the Communist regime. The leading world politicians who most strongly supported the Polish fight for independence, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, were fully aware of this fact. The unusual, unofficial alliance of these two leaders with the Pope, much better known nowadays thanks to the recent publication of classified documents of the period, illustrates an unprecedented role of the Catholic Church in political developments of that time (cf. O’Sullivan: 2008).

18

Ideas and Polemics

2.1.3 The Polish Millennium (1966) This unprecedented role of religion in Polish postwar history would not have been possible without a consistent anti-Communist policy in the Church, especially evident in the 1960s, when Poland became “God’s playground” in a very special way. In 1966, one thousand years after the first Polish prince was baptised, two great powers of Poland – the Communist government on the one hand and the Catholic Church on the other – started an unprecedented ideological debate about power and identity. The debate was presented to the public as a clash of two rival concepts of Polish history : the government organised hundreds of lectures, conferences, concerts and exhibitions devoted to the thousandth anniversary of the Polish state and the Church organised numerous religious celebrations of various kinds to commemorate the thousandth anniversary of the beginning of Christianity in Poland. Perhaps the most significant of these celebrations was the pilgrimage of the picture of the Black Madonna from the famous Czestochowa Sanctuary. After the picture had been “arrested” by the police, a symbolic frame, with no picture inside, continued to travel around Poland, attracting thousands of people – not only devout Catholics but also all those who wanted to demonstrate their aversion to the regime in the only way tolerated by the authorities. This was a unique confrontation between the Millennium of the Polish State and the Millennium of the Baptism of Poland. When the “battle” began, the Church was already the winner in this fight for Polish souls but the clash of the two leaders – Władysław Gomułka, the Communist Party leader, and Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, the Primate of the Church – was a fascinating spectacle of the fight for power over the nation’s identity (cf. e. g. Micewski: 1982, Raina: 2000, Wilanowski: 2002, Chudzik: 1998, Reczka: 2006). In this context one should remember that according to Polish law, until the partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century, the Primate of the Catholic Church was, after the death or abdication of a king, a temporary, acting head of state, called an interrex. For many people in Poland, because of the exceptional role of the Catholic Church after 1945, the Primate was at that time, in a symbolic way, such an interrex – recognised as a moral leader but also – unavoidably – as a political leader.

2.1.4 The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as the European Periphery Inspired by the title of Norman Davies’ book and his intention to associate the notion of the heart of Europe with the role of Catholicism, I started my essay with these few remarks about the period when Poland could be perceived – at least in a symbolic way – as the heart of Europe, and the Catholic Church as the leading

Religion on the Periphery – the Polish Case

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spiritual power of the country. Such an approach to the whole of Polish history can, however, be misleading. We can of course continue to list all kinds of attractive examples and even remind ourselves in this context that, from the late 16th to the late 18th century, the Polish Commonwealth, which comprised the larger parts of present-day Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus and Ukraine, was the largest country in Europe. Indeed, if we speak in terms of the old Polish Commonwealth we are perhaps even more justified in saying that it was the heart of Europe – or at least that the geographical heart of Europe was located on its territory, even closer to the country’s centre than today. On the other hand, when we take into account the significance of this state, it is far more justified to use another geographical term to characterise its role, namely periphery. In his recently published book, The Ghostly Body of the King. Peripheral Struggles with Contemporary Form, the well known Polish sociologist Jan Sowa discusses the idea of the old Polish Commonwealth as a periphery of Europe. This is a book about a peripheral, disintegrating and anachronistic country, deprived of a real king: after the death of the last king from the Jagiellonian dynasty in 1572, all the subsequent kings were elected by the nobility, so were not “real” kings. The real rulers of the country were rich magnates – landowners with their vast landed estates, which had been acquired thanks to colonial expansion of Poland to the east. The country which was finally composed in 1569 of two previously separate states – the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania – is perceived in Sowa’s book as a weak, peripheral, feudal, anachronistic state, but at the same time as a colonial power whose expansion to the east caused weakness in the central government and this power’s own unavoidable collapse at the end of the 18th century, when it was partitioned by the three neighbouring countries (Sowa: 2011). This approach is obviously influenced both by the scepticism of the 19th-century Polish historians from Cracow and by the works of Polish historians of the 1950s and 60s, inspired by Marxism and the French Annales school of historical research. For this reason, the historical analyses presented in this controversial book are not new. When, therefore, the book was presented as a dissertation for the post-doctoral Habilitation degree, it was harshly criticised in a peer review by the eminent historian Andrzej Chwalba, who agreed to the promotion of the author only because the academic degree the candidate applied for was not in history but in cultural studies (Chwalba: 2012). Indeed, the author very skilfully combines findings and conclusions of prominent Marxist historians with cultural and psychoanalytical theories of trendy, contemporary French and British thinkers. The whole concept of the old Polish Commonwealth as a periphery is of course not new and is likely to be appreciated by readers today as more reliable than the concept of Poland as the heart of Europe. It is merely a coincidence that Niall Ferguson’s famous new book, Civi-

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lization: the West and the Rest, was published in the same year. This book, by a renowned Harvard and Oxford historian, examines what the author calls the most interesting question of our day : “Why, beginning around 1500, did a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world?” He attributes this divergence to the West’s development of six “killer apps” largely missing elsewhere in the world. According to him, Western Europe’s domination over the rest of the world was based on “competition, science, the rule of law, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic” (Ferguson: 2011). And the Western European work ethic – as we have known very well since the publication of Max Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – is based on Protestantism. In this context the Old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was obviously a peripheral country, in no sense being the centre or the heart of Europe, because Europe was understood to be Western Europe. Although Poland was the largest country in Europe – geographically understood – and is also accused of having been a colonial power, the real powers and colonial powers, perceived as central to Europe, were England, France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. It is not accidental that none of the European territories beyond the borders of the ancient Roman Empire were included in the dominant discourse of Europe. The territory between the West and the East, between the eastern borders of the Holy Roman Empire and the western borders of today’s Russia, was radically called by Sowa a “no man’s land”. In this way Sowa recalled the old concept of Eastern Europe. The story of how the continent of Europe came to be conceived of as divided into Western Europe and Eastern Europe is presented by Larry Wolff in his fascinating book entitled Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilisation on the Mind of the Enlightenment: “Almost all of the commentators on Eastern Europe, whether they ever set foot on its soil, looked upon it as half-barbarian and half-civilised and wrote about it in a condescencing manner that has affected Western perceptions ever since” (Wolff: 1994). Whatever we think about the validity of the old concept of Eastern Europe and the new attempts to justify its existence, as well as about the division between the East and the West or the “West and the Rest”, it would be difficult to replace the cultural, economic and political concept of Poland as a periphery with a geographical, Romantic or nationalistic concept of it as the heart or midpoint of Europe.

2.1.5 The Triumph of the Counter-Reformation on the Periphery of Europe Since 1945, because of the shift of Polish and German borders to the west and mass migrations, Poland has become practically uniform in terms of national

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and religious identity, with about 90 percent of citizens declaring both Polish national identity and a Roman Catholic faith. However, contrary to the present situation, in the 16th to 18th centuries the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a peripheral state, was an interesting case of a multinational and multicultural country. Although it was officially a Roman Catholic kingdom, at one point Roman Catholics constituted less than forty percent of the population, the remainder being divided between the Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, Lutheran, Calvinist and even Muslim minorities. The state policy of religious peace did not allow one to take a heretic to court or expel him from the country. At that time, Poland and Transylvania were the only countries in Europe where Catholics had public theological discussions with representatives of the Socinians – the most radical, antitrinitarian movement of the Reformation. We have convincing evidence of how strange the whole situation appeared to foreign visitors who were unused to these manifestations of religious liberty. Damiano a Fonseca, a Spanish Dominican conducting a visitation of the convents of his order in Poland, recollected that in 1617, during a reception at the court of Prince Jerzy Czartoryski, he was forced to undertake a public debate with a Socinian nobleman about the divinity of Jesus Christ. He reportedly was successful and received an ovation from the tipsy guests. Fonseca noted how puzzled he was “to find Catholic, Orthodox and Arian [Socinian] nobles there in the greatest harmony!” The biblical and theological disputes had political consequences. Heresy had been legal in Poland since the Warsaw Confederacy of 1573 which allowed all denominations to exist peacefully in the Kingdom. In 1578, this law was entered into the book of Polish statutes and laws. This was strongly objected to by the Jesuits. In his sermons one of their number, Piotr Skarga, a prominent preacher and polemicist, warned: The disunity will bring unto you slavery that will bury your liberties and turn them into mockery.…You will become like an abandoned widow, you who govern other peoples; and you will become for your enemies an object of ridicule and derision (cf. Wilczek: 1999).

The Jesuits finally won the battle. As the intellectual leaders of the CounterReformation they were instrumental in the process of the restoration of Catholicism throughout the country. This restoration was rendered less difficult by the fact that Polish Protestantism had no deep social and theological roots in Poland-Lithuania; indeed, it is sometimes even understood to have been a rebellion of a younger generation of influential noblemen in the 1540s and 1550s who desired to gain power against the influential Catholic Church and make sure that the execution of law, real estate ownership and power over peasants was in the hands of noblemen rather than bishops and vicars (cf. Maciuszko: 2013).

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Although a hesitant king, Sigismundus Augustus, read Calvin’s Institutes and had intensive contact with numerous European reformers, the attempts to establish to establish a national church independent of Rome failed in the mid-16th century. The Reformation in Poland was only an episode, as one prominent historian stated in the often-criticised title of one of his books (cf. Urban: 1988). Besides, the Catholic Church could celebrate in the first half of the 17th century one of the most spectacular successes in its history : in the period when the Reformation was gaining new territories in Western Europe, in the East a number of Eastern Orthodox bishops and dioceses decided to break relations with the Patriarch of Constantinople and “enter into communion with the Pope and accept his power and authority”. The 33 articles of Union were signed by a number of Ukrainian bishops in 1596 and accepted by the Pope. The so-called Uniate or Greek Catholic Church (both Ukrainian and Belorussian), with Eastern liturgy and Roman supervision, still exists today as a part of the Roman Catholic Church and remains a constant source of debate and conflict between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Not only did numerous influential noblemen return to the Roman Church, but the large Eastern territory of the Commonwealth accepted the religious and political power of the Catholic Church (cf. Halecki: 1959). In the late 16th century, with the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church in the East, numerous conversions to Catholicism in Central Poland, and the expulsion of the Socinians (the Polish Brethren) from Polish territory, Poland started its long journey towards religious uniformity with the Roman Catholic denomination.

2.1.6 Conclusions: New Challenges on the Way Back to the Heart of Europe Since the partitioning of Poland at the end of the 18th century, the ongoing process of the growing influence of the Roman Catholic Church has been strengthened by a number of factors (cf. Kłoczowski: 2000): – the patriotic leadership of Roman Catholic bishops and priests in the 19th century, especially under the Russian and Prussian partitions, – the political role of the Roman Catholic Church in 1918–1939, imposed by the new republic; even the Polish constitution included an unusual article about the Roman Catholic Church’s “privileged position among equal religious denominations” (Pease: 2009), – the mass support of Roman Catholic clergy given to the Polish resistance movement against the German and Soviet occupations during the Second World War, – the change of borders and mass migrations after 1945 which resulted in national and religious homogeneity,

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– the Church’s support of the anti-Communist opposition between 1945 and 1989. There have been many significant changes in the role of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland since 1989 – during which time Poland itself has been moving from the peripheries of Europe to a more central position. “Competition, science, the rule of law, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic” (Ferguson: 2011) have started to become central ideas for Poland. Thanks to the transformation of the last 20 years, Poland has moved to the West on a symbolic map of Europe. Democratic ideas, secularisation and the influence of European Union standards have also influenced Polish religion. The current changes of course provide valuable material for sociologists who today engage in research on – for example – the clash of conservative and liberal tendencies in the Church. Today Poland, deprived of its former eastern territories, which now belong to Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, is far away from its peripheral, colonial past but remains – together with Portugal – on the peripheries of the European Union. The former Polish territories, including Western Ukraine, are waiting for European Union membership. This new situation encourages us to redefine the notion of periphery and brings all kinds of new political, economic, cultural and religious challenges for the new Europe.

2.2

The Polish Reception of John Calvin’s Works in the Context of the History of Christianity in Poland

2.2.1 Introduction This essay was inspired by an annotated bibliography entitled John Calvin in Poland, compiled by Wiesław Mincer, edited by myself, and published in 2012 as the third volume in my book series The Reformation in Poland and East-Central Europe (Mincer : 2012). In this bibliography, 528 items are included – books, treatises, articles, essays, poems, and book reviews devoted to John Calvin and, at the same time, related to Poland. These works were published in the years between 1548 and 2012. Although at first sight 528 publications is not a large number, we should remember that they were published in a country which remained officially Roman Catholic during the age of the Reformation, which has never officially accepted the Protestant Reformation, and which was won over by the triumphant Jesuit-Catholic Counter-Reformation as early as the first half of the 17th century. Today the Protestant minority is Poland is very small, and there are only around 3000 members of the Reformed church. Seen in this

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light 528 is quite a large number of publications, even if it includes 53 letters by Calvin himself, 60 letters to Calvin, and 64 letters first published in an appendix to the Thesaurus epistolicus Calvinianus written not to Calvin or by Calvin but nevertheless related to Polish issues. Leaving aside these letters, 351 publications still remain, including 38 works by Calvin published in Poland or related to Poland and 313 other publications devoted to Calvin and published between 1550 and 2012. It is important to emphasise that this Calvinian bibliography – a unique publication of its kind in Central and Eastern Europe – does not deal with socalled Calvinism and its reception, but only with John Calvin himself, and his life and work. This is an important distinction, although it is of course sometimes very difficult to decide what is Calvinian and what is Calvinist. However, only references to Calvin, and not to other Reformed thinkers, were taken into account in this bibliography. The concentration on Calvin alone made the whole project clearer from a methodological point of view.

2.2.2 Calvin’s Contacts with Poland – a Bibliographical Survey John Calvin’s contacts with Poland during his lifetime have already been discussed in a number of articles in German, English, and Polish, beginning with a series of fundamental works by Theodor Wotschke, especially his Der Briefwechsel der Schweizer mit den Polen (Wotschke: 1908). This volume listed all the letters from the Opera Calvini related to Poland. In 1965 a prominent Polish historian of Protestantism, Oskar Bartel, published an article in which he discussed these contacts in detail (Bartel: 1965). In 1975, Nancy Marilyn Conradt, a student at the University of Michigan, defended a doctoral dissertation entitled John Calvin, Theodore Beza and the Reformation in Poland and the first three chapters of this work were entitled as follows: I. Calvin and Poland, 1556–1560; II. Calvin and the problem of George Biandrata; III. Calvin and the Mediator controversy ; and IV. Calvin, Beza and the Polish antitrinitarians. The most recent article on Calvin’s contacts with Poland was a paper by Mihaly Markus entitled Calvin und Polen which was delivered at the International Congress on Calvin Research in 2002 (Markus: 2004). However, the most comprehensive article on the first period of these contacts was published by George Huntston Williams (Williams: 1981). In it he proposed the following periodisation of Calvin’s contacts with Poland. First, from 1549, the year in which he dedicated his commentary on the Letter to the Hebrews to King Sigismundus Augustus, to 1556; second, from 1556 to 1560, the period during which Johannes a Lasco was in Poland as a leader of the Polish church; and third, from the death of a Lasco in 1560 to the death of Calvin in 1564.

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I would like to propose in the following paragraphs a slightly different periodisation, based on my analysis of Calvin’s correspondence with Poles (which is included in the bibliography of John Calvin in Poland). Calvin’s letters to the Polish King and nobles can serve as a starting point for reflection on the origin and crisis of the Polish Reformed church and the relations of foreign reformers with Poland (cf. Greef: 2008). The first evidence of Calvin’s contacts with Poland is his introduction to his commentary on the Letter to the Hebrews, written on May 23, 1549. This commentary is dedicated to the Polish King, Sigismundus Augustus. In his dedicatory letter Calvin says that Johann Eck (as we remember, a leading Catholic apologist who debated with Luther) dedicated his book on the Holy Mass to the King’s Father, i. e. the previous King of Poland, Sigismund the Old. Calvin claims that Eck’s idea of sacrifice is contradictory to the idea of Christ’s priesthood. Calvin also argues that the Letter to the Hebrews contains the full teaching about Christ’s eternal divinity and unique priesthood. He encourages Sigismundus Augustus to promote the Reformation in Poland. This dedication has symbolic meaning not only as Calvin’s first contact with Poland, but also because many people put their hopes in the King, who allegedly had a friendly attitude towards the Reformation (although there is no reliable evidence of this). However, Calvin’s contacts with Poland can also be placed in the context of many intellectual debates of the mid-16th century, when numerous Christian intellectuals, although officially Roman Catholic, were involved in theological debates about various aspects of the Church and doctrine. Many of them held the idealistic hope that the Council of Trent would introduce ideas favourable to irenicism, toleration, and Christian unity. A very typical example of such an approach may be seen in the life and work of the great Polish Renaissance humanist Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski, known as the author of a fundamental work about the Christian state (De republica emendanda), and of Silvae – a subtle theological analysis of the Holy Trinity. The next stage of Calvin’s contacts with Poland occurred between the years 1555 and 1559. In December 1555 Calvin sent to Poland as many as nine letters upon the request of Francesco Lismanino, who at that time was already under Calvin’s influence (although very soon he became a very inconvenient ally) and who for some time read twice a week fragments of the Institutes to King Sigismundus Augustus. In these nine letters Calvin calls for the promotion of the Reformation in Poland and especially for preparing a new translation of the Bible into Polish. He furthermore wished to establish a new Protestant university which would educate future ministers. Another interesting collection of letters is his correspondence with a leading Roman Catholic magnate (prince), Jan Tarnowski, who tries to explain to Calvin that introducing the Reformation into Poland could lead to social disorder. Even more interesting is his correspondence with Jakub Uchan´ski, a Catholic bishop and one of the most im-

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portant leaders of the Polish church, who was planning to introduce reforms in his diocese close to the ideas of the Reformation – the lay celebration of the Lord’s Supper with both bread and wine, the introduction of Polish into the liturgy, and the abolition of priestly celibacy. Although Calvin strongly encouraged the bishop to introduce such reforms, Uchan´ski ultimately turned back from these plans, and later became one of the most conservative bishops, especially after 1562, when he became the Primate of Poland, i. e. the leader of the whole Polish Roman Catholic Church. The third stage of Calvin’s contacts with Poland was an intensive correspondence associated with debates about antitrinitarian ideas, which were endangering the future development of the Reformed church in Poland. There are a few letters in this collection which are especially interesting: two letters of 1560 and 1561 against Francesco Stancaro and a polemic with Jacob Sylvius in which Calvin presented his famous Brevis admonitio ad fratres Polonos – a strong defence of the idea of the Holy Trinity against the views of Biandrata and Stancaro. The tensions of the late 1550s and early 1560s were exacerbated by the death of Johannes a Lasco and then, a few years later, by the death of Calvin himself. These events precipitated the kind of crisis which Calvin had long feared, although arguably even he had not fully realised the actual dangers. The antitrinitarian Church of the Polish Brethren emerged in the 16th century, within Calvin’s own lifetime, as the result of a split in the Reformed church. During numerous synods, there were intense disputes and debates. Many Polish adherents of John Calvin wanted to introduce changes into the Reformed doctrines. As we know from his correspondence, Calvin was very concerned about the situation, but his interventions proved fruitless. A respected Reformed theologian and minister, Gregorius Paulus of Brzeziny, started to call into question the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and was supported by others, including some educated Italian and German refugees, such as Giorgio Biandrata, who had become influential in the Polish Reformed community. These refugees joined the group of Polish Reformed pastors and together they formulated the most radical and theologically sophisticated heresy of the Reformation period (cf. Pelikan: 1991, Williams: 1978, 1992, Kot: 1956, 1957). Calvin’s correspondence is a good source for studying both his approach to these dramatic events and the development of early antitrinitarianism in Poland. Although not everyone is interested in alternative history, the case of Calvin’s contacts with the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth is a tempting example for those who enjoy thinking about counterfactuals. For this reason I would like to quote two passages from the aforementioned study on Calvin’s contacts with Poland by the renowned Reformation scholar George Huntston Williams, once the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. This is undoubtedly

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the most profound work written on this topic. Williams is the author of numerous books and articles on the Reformation, especially the Radical Reformation, and at the beginning of his inspiring paper on the “Polish-Lithuanian Calvin” writes the following: If Calvin and his Swiss colleagues had been more observant, attentive, and responsive, the Reformed Church of the [Polish-Lithuanian] Commonwealth might have emerged from organizational and doctrinal controversy as a major and abiding entity. Instead they relied largely on the somewhat Erasmian Łaski [John a Lasco]. […] he had more of the strengths of an administrator than of a theologian, which the local situation surely required (Williams: 1981).

And here are his conclusions: If Calvin had better understood the strengths and weaknesses of Łaski and his people and also more swiftly perceived the theological agony and confusion of the Poles […], and if he had shown half the interest in the [Polish-Lithuanian] Commonwealth that he did in his native Catholic-Huguenot France, European history would have taken a fundamentally different course, whether for good or ill (Williams: 1981).

Of course historians should be interested in, as Williams put it, “John Calvin’s attitude toward and influence in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth stretching from Cracow well beyond Kiev, the biggest state in Europe in the sixteenth century” (Williams: 1981). But they also should not forget about the web of complicated social, political, and religious issues which resulted in the development of antitrinitarianism and the final triumph of the Catholic CounterReformation. I believe that even if John a Lasco had been a better theologian and even if John Calvin had been much more interested in Polish issues, Poland would not have become a Protestant state. The Jesuits finally won the battle. As intellectual leaders of the Counter-Reformation they were instrumental in the process of the restoration of Catholicism throughout the country. The attempts to establish a national church independent of Rome failed in the mid-16th century. The Reformation in Poland was only an episode, as a prominent historian stated in the often-criticised title of one of his books (cf. Urban: 1988).

2.2.3 Calvin’s Works Translated and Published in Poland John Calvin’s theological works have never been widely known in Poland and have only very rarely been published in the Polish language. Indeed, a full translation of the Institutes of the Christian Religion has not yet been published, not to mention other of his lesser known works. Nevertheless the first translations of Calvin into Polish can be traced back to the turbulent period of the 1550s and 60s. Only a few years ago, a Russian researcher, Margarita Korzo,

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proved that a fragment of Calvin’s Catechismus Genevensis Prior (published in French in 1537) was translated into Polish and published in Königsberg between 1552 and 1556 (Korzo: 2006, 2007). Today we have only a few pages of this work, which were hidden in the cover of another work published in 1556, and it is still not clear whether the whole Geneva Catechism was published in Polish in the mid-16th century or not. Leaving this question aside, its place of publication is no surprise to anyone acquainted with Polish-Lithuanian history of the early modern period. As the reader may know, at that time Königsberg was the capital of the Duchy of Prussia, which was a part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and was ruled by the Polish king’s cousin, Albrecht von Hohenzollern. The city served as an important cultural and academic centre in which Polish students were trained and prints in the Polish language were published, including the first Protestant (Lutheran) translation of the New Testament into Polish. The Königsberg edition of the Geneva Catechism is probably the first publication of Calvin’s work in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and in the Polish language. However, the first works of Calvin which are really important as part of his dialogue with Poland, although not published there, were associated with the antitrinitarian crisis. Ad quaestiones Georgii Biandratae responsum (1558) and Responsum ad Fratres Polonos Quomodo Christus sit Mediator, ad refutandum Stancari errorem (1561) were the two treatises written against the Italian antitrinitarian heretics who introduced the crisis into the Polish Reformed church. The main work by Calvin devoted to these issues was, however, Brevis admonitio Joannis Calvini ad fratres Polonos… (1563), which is largely a polemic against the theological anitrinitarian views of Gregorius Paulus of Brzeziny. The above-mentioned works should be listed together with two works dedicated to Poles. In 1549, Calvin published Commentarii in Epistolam ad Hebraeos, which I have already mentioned as the first example of his contacts with Poland. The last Polish non-epistolographical polonicum published during Calvin’s lifetime was Commentarii integri in Acta Apostolorum (1564), a work dedicated to Prince Nicholas Radziwiłł. Radziwiłł, who died one year later, was the main protector of Calvinism in Lithuania; his death facilitated the development of antitrinitarianism in the country. From the 16th century there is only one more Calvinian polonicum, the final one in that century, published in 1599. This is a translation of Book 4, chapter XX of the Institutes: De politica administratione, and is a Cracow print, about 100 pages long. One further translation of a fragment of the Institutes (and the only Polish translation of Calvin in the 17th century) was published in 1626. This fragment of Book 4, again about 100 pages long, is devoted to the sacraments.

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This is the whole collection of Calvin’s works related to Poland or translated into Polish in the 16th and 17th centuries: two prefaces, three polemics with antitrinitarians, a translation of the Geneva Catechism (of which we have today only 4 pages) and two translations of fragments of the Institutes: eight works altogether. It is very significant that none of Calvin’s works were published in Poland in the 18th and 19th centuries. To be more precise, none of Calvin’s works were published in Polish during the 280 years between 1626 and 1905! In 1905, when Central Poland was still under Russian rule, the synod of the Polish Evangelical Reformed Church in Warsaw published a Polish translation (primarily from German, with reference to the French) of the first three chapters of Calvin’s short treatise on Holy Communion (originally published in Strasbourg in 1540). Fragments of this translation were reprinted in 1980 and 1993 with no significant changes! Between 1905 and 1957, again, no translation of Calvin’s work appeared in Polish. Between 1957 and 2009, only 28 very short fragments of the Institutes of the Christian Religion were published, mainly in Jednota (The Unity), the journal of the Evangelical Reformed Church. The only existing collection that is longer, the Institutio (140 pages), was published in 1972 as part of a secular academic anthology entitled Philosophical and Religious Thought of the 16th-Century Reformation. The commentary to this edition was typical for the period. Institutio was presented as one of the most prominent theological treatises of the Reformation and compared to the Summa Theologiae by Thomas Aquinas. The editors emphasise that Calvin’s thought is based on his view concerning the “absolute authority of God as an eternal legislator and judge, whose will is the law”. According to the authors, the problem of predestination is presented with “iron consistency” and Calvin was aware of its “gloomy significance”. They argue further that this “idea of a chosen people” was an important “impulse for the development of the bourgeois society” (Calvin: 1972). Such expressions are typical of the style of Polish academic publications in the humanities and social sciences at that time, when the academic community was under control of state censorship and influenced by Marxist terminology. In summary, in the first half of the 20th century, until 1957, no translations of Calvin were made in Poland and, if we do not take into account the 1905 translation of a short fragment of the Institutes, we can say that for 332 years, from 1626 to 1957, no single passage of Calvin was published in Poland. In the second half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, 28 fragments were published, including only one longer collection of passages from the Institutes.

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2.2.4 Reception of Calvin’s Thought in the Early Modern Period and Academic Publications on Calvin in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries It is highly significant that all 38 works devoted at least partly to Calvin and his thought and published in the early modern period, between 1550 and 1784, were polemical – written by antitrinitarians, Catholics, or Lutherans. There was no positive account of Calvin’s life and work published in Poland at that time. The first work on Calvin related to Poland is De votis brevis disceptatio contra impugnationes Joanni Calvini by Joannes Cochlaeus, published in Mainz in 1550 with a dedication to Nicholas Dzierzgowski, Archbishop of Gniezno. This polemic with Calvin’s Institutio, written by a famous German Lutheran theologian, was dedicated to the Polish Roman Catholic archbishop and only for that reason may be included in the collection of polonica. In the 1560s, during the trinitarian debate in the Polish Reformed church, three important antitrinitarian works against Calvin were published in Poland: De Trinitate et Mediatore Domine Nostro Iesu Christo adversus Henricum Bullingerum, Petrum Martyrem et Ioannem Calvinum by Francesco Stancaro (1562), and two works by Gregorius Paulus of Brzeziny entitled Carmen ad Joannem Calvinum et pios fratres and Epistola… monitoria, ad Tigurinos ministros et Calvinum (both c. 1563). Among the remaining 38 early modern anti-Calvin works, we have translations into Polish of books written by foreign authors: for example, the famous French theologian and physician, J8rime-HermHs Bolsec, who debated with Calvin on predestination; the English Jesuit Edmund Campion; the French opponent of Calvin, Sebastian Castellio; and other, lesser-known authors such as Laurence Arthur Faunt, an English Jesuit theologian and missionary to Poland. There are a number of anti-Calvin polemics by Polish Jesuits, including two well-known authors – Stanisław Grodzicki and Marcin Łaszcz. The title of Grodzicki’s work, including fragments on Calvin, is very significant: The rules of heretic faith, that is the evidence that heretic leaders claim that their own brains and not the Holy Scripture are the rule of faith (Grodzicki: 1592). None of these Polish and Latin polemical pamphlets are devoted exclusively to John Calvin, but he and his works are mentioned there very often, usually in a very stereotypical, simplified way. The works published in Polish usually include unrefined passages for undemanding readers, full of absurd stories and accusations, often written in verse, all of which are typical for religious polemics of that period. In one of these works by Hieronim Przewodowski, published in 1611, the author explains that “heretic ministers”, i. e. Calvin and Luther, are to be likened to Lucifer, Judas Iscariot, and Pontius Pilate. Calvin is presented there as a man without will or memory, as a blasphemer, and even as a robber. Latin polemics were not much more sophisticated – for example, in 1672 one Jesuit, Jan Kwiatkiewicz, published a polemic entitled Fascinus a Luthero, Zwinglio, Calvini

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aliisque haeresiarchis…, and a typical phrase in his polemic with the Institutes is the following: “novum Calvini Deum qui ex Diabolo sit”. I have studied numerous religious polemics of the early modern period, both anti-Protestant, anti-Catholic, and anti-Socinian, and I am fully aware of the style and methods of persuasion of these texts, including an especially unrefined style of Jesuit polemics in vernacular languages in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. I have no illusions about the way in which our forebears argued with each other about religious matters (cf. Wilczek: 1999). My point here is that after the antitrinitarian crisis of the early 1560s, when the most talented Reformed ministers moved to the antitrinitarian church of the Polish Brethren, and after the triumphal victory of the Catholic Counter-Reformation led by the Jesuits, there was no possibility for a fair religious debate which would include Reformed Protestants. In these circumstances there was also no possibility for an impartial presentation of John Calvin and his theological thought. Calvin was present in the public debate in Poland from the 1560s to the late 18th century as a marginal and distasteful figure, worth mentioning only as a pitiful foreign heretic. This situation was the result of a gradual marginalisation of the Reformed faith in Poland from the end of the 16th century. Following the conversions to Catholicism of many powerful merchants, noblemen, and princes, the Reformed church was deprived of influential supporters. Crowds of fanatics attacked Protestant churches and even funerals. It is often forgotten that, in the mid-17th century, not only Socinians but also Calvinists were persecuted and expelled from the country for alleged collaboration with Swedish invaders, and a number of Reformed churches were destroyed. The kings usually supported anti-Protestant riots inspired by the Jesuits in various cities of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, for example in Vilnius. In the first half of the 18th century the rights of Protestants to be members of the parliament, tribunals, and state offices were gradually limited. This was a serious deprivation of civic rights. On the other hand we should remember that these “anti-dissident” laws were introduced 100 years later than similar regulations in other European Catholic countries, as a result of the process of so-called confessionalisation. One should not, therefore, be surprised that many Protestants, including members of the Reformed church, were in favour of the situation resulting from the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century. The future rulers of divided Poland had already been using the so-called “dissidents’ case” in their political manipulations from the mid-18th century, and after the partitions of Poland, Prussia, Russia and even Austria were much more favourable toward non-Catholic denominations than the Catholic rulers of independent Poland-Lithuania. This country existed until 1795 when the last, final partition took place (the first two having been in 1772 and 1793). All this does not mean that the number of publications on Calvin rapidly

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increased on Polish and Lithuanian lands after the partitions of Poland. I already mentioned the publication of a fragment of the Institutes in Warsaw in 1905. The first publication on Calvin in the 19th century appeared only in 1863 and this was a short note in a periodical published by the Reformed Church, devoted to the idea of building a monument to Calvin in Warsaw. Other publications in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century (up to 1918, when Poland became independent) include twenty items: encyclopaedia entries on Calvin, short articles in church periodicals, and a small number of scholarly publications on Calvin and Poland, including a few short articles and one book by Tadeusz Grabowski (Grabowski: 1906). This book was not a breakthrough academic achievement, but a thorough study which also included a chapter on Calvin’s significance in the history of European literatures and a chapter on relations between Calvin and the Poles in the 16th century. Nowadays, such an outdated piece of scholarship could be completely ignored if it were not the only general survey of Calvinist literature in Poland published so far. Of course, many studies have been published in the last 100 years on Calvinist writers and their works (especially Nicholas Rej, called the father of Polish literature), but no other comprehensive monograph or textbook on Calvinist literature in Poland has been published since 1906. There have been, however, books and articles on John Calvin published in the last 100 years, but only 18 of them during the interwar period (1918–1939) and about 240 after the Second World War. This number looks promising – 240 postwar publications on Calvin in a country where the Calvinist community has now about 1500 members. It is not surprising that in these circumstances many of these publications are short articles for the general reader, published in modest church periodicals. As far as scholarly publications are concerned, there are a few authors worth mentioning here. In common opinion, as well as in Protestant scholarly circles, the most distinguished Calvin scholar in Poland today is Piotr Jaskjła, a Roman Catholic priest, full professor at the Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Opole, Director of the Institute of Ecumenism, and Chair of the Department of Theology of Post-Reformation Churches. Although his professionalism is unquestionable, his case is a paradox typical for a predominantly Catholic country : a Roman Catholic priest serves as the main expert on Calvin. Although he has published a number of articles on various issues related to Calvin and Calvinism, including a comprehensive article on the doctrine of predestination, his research is mainly devoted to the theology of the Holy Spirit in Calvin’s thought. To this issue he has devoted numerous articles and a monograph. His other topics include Calvin’s teaching on the Lord’s Supper, baptism, faith, confession, kenosis, justification, the incarnation of Christ, the Eucharist, and eschatology. His 25 books and articles present an interesting view on John Calvin. This is the view of a Roman Catholic

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theologian and all the topics are discussed from a Catholic and also ecumenical perspective. This is a very objective approach to the theology of John Calvin, albeit from a Catholic perspective, as can be especially observed in the articles on confession, the Eucharist, and predestination. These issues are evaluated and criticised from the point of view of Catholic theology. Although there is no reason to criticise a Catholic theologian for writing analyses on Calvin in favour of a Catholic point of view, it would also be beneficial to have publications on Calvin’s theology written from a Reformed or neutral/secular perspective. The only Polish Reformed theologian and pastor who publishes scholarly articles on Calvin is Rafał Leszczyn´ski, professor at the Christian Theological Academy in Warsaw. He is a specialist in early Christian theology and his articles on Calvin are written on the margins of his activities. However, thanks to this “marginal” diligence, a Polish reader can now enjoy a series of articles which meet the highest academic standards: Ciceronian elements in John Calvin’s “Institutes of the Christian religion”, Nature and grace in the theology of John Calvin, Predestination in the works of John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas, The theology of John Calvin (a comprehensive, 30 page account), The ethics and political doctrine of Calvin, The sacramentology of John Calvin, and a chapter on John Calvin in his excellent book entitled Fathers of the Reformation and Philosophical Aspects of their Thought. Although these publications are written only in addition to his main field of interest, they form – in my opinion – a collection of the best publications on Calvin’s theology ever written in the Polish language. There is one more author who has devoted a series of his publications to Calvin’s work, which is discussed from a philosophical and theological perspective. Stanisław Piwko is a philosopher, not a theologian, and has served as Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the Warsaw School of Economics – the best university for economics in the country. He has published widely on Calvin’s theodicy, anthropology, and ethics, and on other philosophical aspects of his thought. In 1987, he published a book entitled Philosophical Aspects of John Calvin’s Doctrine. This was the first academic book on John Calvin published in Poland. His 1995 book John Calvin: Life and Work was printed as the first academic monograph on both the life and work of Calvin. This was an expanded version of his previous book on Calvin’s doctrine, supplemented by – as the author himself put it – a “chronology of literary achievements of the reformer and the historical background of his work”. Leszczyn´ski’s essays and book chapters, together with Piwko’s books and articles, are attempts to present Calvin’s life and work from the academic perspective, with limited prejudice and with obvious respect for the achievements of the reformer. At the same time, this is evidence of the current situation regarding Calvin’s presence in Polish readership and scholarship: if the above-mentioned works by Jaskjła, Leszczyn´ski, and Piwko are the only professional academic

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works on Calvin ever published in Poland, it means that Calvin’s life and work are almost invisible in this country (for a bibliographical description of all these books, see Mincer : 2012). There were, however, more authors who had ambitions to write monographic works on Calvin. We must remember that at least until 1989, religious studies in Poland were very much influenced by the Communist version of Marxism and served as a tool in the authorities’ fight against religion. Although Roman Catholicism was the main target of this anti-religious campaign, all Christian denominations were presented as examples of religion to be treated, in accordance with the famous saying by Karl Marx, as “das Opium des Volkes” – the opiate of the people. Marxist writers were torn between two attitudes. The first one was to use Protestantism and Socinianism as positive examples of religion in opposition to reactionary Roman Catholicism, which was both anti-Protestant and anti-Marxist. One example of such an approach was the publication of the Library of Reformation Writers, a monumental academic book series in which many Calvinist, Lutheran, and Socinian works were published in Latin and in Polish. This was a very typical example of using Protestantism as a political tool against Catholicism because, at the same time, Catholic authors of the early modern period were not in such a privileged position in publication projects subsidised by the state. In light of this it is highly significant that the last volume in the Library of Reformation Writers was published in 1989, the year of the fall of Communism in Poland. The second attitude was a more typical expression of the Marxist opinion about religion: Calvinism was an example of Christian religion, and viewed as equally as harmful to the country as Catholicism. John Calvin was presented as an intolerant, narrow-minded religious fanatic and persecutor of Miguel Servet, and the doctrine of predestination was discussed as an example of the cruel, degenerate character of Christian theology. A typical example of such an approach is a book by Andrzej Tokarczyk entitled John Calvin, which was published in 1989. The author emphasises that this is a “non-confessional” book, but numerous references to Karl Marx leave no doubt as to what kind of “nonconfessionalism” the author represents. One year earlier, in 1988, a biographical novel by Jerzy Piechowski was published and the title itself – A Prophet or a Dictator – is clear evidence of the character of the book. After the fall of Communism, two translations of foreign biographies of Calvin were published: Calvin by Bernard Cottret in 2000, and A Life of John Calvin by Alister McGrath in 2009. I believe that at least one more excellent biography of Calvin should be translated into Polish: Calvin, by Bruce Gordon, which also includes a comprehensive chapter on Calvin and Calvinism in Poland and East-Central Europe. We are still awaiting the Polish translation of Calvin’s Institutes. Before it is finished, it would also be good to publish an anthology of Calvin’s other works, in order to present to the Polish reader at least a slim

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volume with a selection of translations of these works, hitherto completely unknown in Poland.

2.2.5 Instead of a Conclusion In such a context, it is quite surprising that a renowned Polish poet wrote a poem on John Calvin. Ewa Lipska, a very well-known and award-winning Polish poet who has been translated into many languages, is the author of a poem entitled Calvin. She is not a religious poet and Christianity is not an important part of her work. Calvin is an intriguing and ambiguous poem, but there is no doubt that it summarises all kinds of universal, not merely Polish, stereotypes about Calvin. Let me include it to serve as a conclusion to this essay on Calvin’s paradoxical presence in Poland over the last five centuries: Calvin A slim one. And shy. Little sleep. Headaches. He was afraid of fear. He lived in an age of crime tourism. Letters of suspects. Arrests. Executions. A good time for pyromaniacs. During processions on six sites of meditation stakes of burning convicts. Inexhaustible avenues of treason. The year 1535. In Paris. His room was meticulously searched. Papers confiscated. Correspondence. He’s the author of a treatise on the dream of the soul. In Catholics he discerns Satan’s audacity. To top it all bubonic plague. Famine. The year 1541. Return to Geneva. Mutual provocations. Fanatical hatred. Terror yapping in the streets. Religion doesn’t save him. A utopian vision of eternity. He weakens. Weakens more and more.

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A dry landscape. A red trickle of light. Echo of evil. He weakens. Weakens more and more. He dies. Converted into sin (Lipska: 2009).

2.3

The Myth of the Polish Reformation: Socinianism in Modern Historiography

2.3.1 Stanislas Lubieniecki’s Historia reformationis Polonicae as a Source of the Myth of the Polish Reformation The current understanding of the Polish Reformation is based on numerous myths. The most important concerns the preeminent role of the Radical Reformation, especially with regard to the Church of the Polish Brethren, who promoted ideas of antitrinitarianism and unitarianism, and who were later called Socinians. According to many historians, the legacy of the Reformation and Protestantism itself is not important in Polish culture: only the Radical Reformation movement represents the mainstream – at least the intellectual mainstream – of the Polish Reformation. Contrary to the popular view, this myth was not created by Marxist-Communists for whom the Church of the Polish Brethren was a good example of a movement which was at the same time antiCatholic, anti-Protestant and even pre-Communist. Rather, the first influential creator of this myth lived much earlier. Indeed, Stanisław Lubieniecki was the author of the most comprehensive history of the Polish Reformation ever written, Historia Reformationis Polonicae, published in 1685, ten years after his death. This influential representative of the Socinian movement offered his account in four hundred pages. It is written in such a way that it presents in a straightforward fashion the story of how the Reformation movement in Poland allegedly transformed into its most mature and excellent form, unitarianism. Almost never using the word “unitarian(ism)” and never mentioning the word “Socinianism”, Lubieniecki presented the history of the Polish Reformation as the history of the establishment of the unitarian church from its beginnings in the early 1550s to the death of Faustus Socinus in 1604, with a few marginal chapters concerning events up to 1638, “when the intellectual centre of Rakjw was shut down by the highest [Polish] authorities, the King and the Diet” (Lubieniecki: 1995). The first and only extensive Polish Reformation history was written as though antitrinitarianism/unitarianism constituted the major Reformation movement.

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This approach had later consequences. The Church of the Polish Brethren emerged in the 16th century as the result of a schism in the Calvinist church; the brightest minds among the Calvinist ministers moved to the new “minor church”. Exceptionally effective initiatives of Counter-Reformation proponents, including the Jesuits, transformed Poland-Lithuania, mostly peacefully, into a predominantly Roman Catholic country. For that reason, this myth has some reality : Socinianism is an important component of Polish Reformation history. Nonetheless, misunderstandings still prevail concerning the history of this movement and the history of the Reformation in general. Let me discuss them in more detail.

2.3.2 Polish Reformation in Twentieth-Century Historiography Lubieniecki’s major work is not an exception as an example of myth-creating activity in historical studies. The story of the Polish Reformation, and what is termed the Radical Reformation, is among the most perplexing in historiography – full of confusions, misunderstandings and false statements. Chapters devoted to Eastern European Reformation in most academic textbooks on the Reformation are very short and based on outdated secondary sources, published usually not later than the early 1960s, and even sometimes the 1940s and 50s. For example in a 570-page textbook on The European Reformation written by a distinguished scholar in the field, advertised as an “incisive and wide-ranging study”, published by Oxford University Press in 1991 and reprinted many times, only three pages are devoted to what the author calls New “Heresies” in Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe means here merely Poland and Hungary, and the whole chapter is based only on outdated and unreliable secondary sources available in English and published in the 1940s (cf. Cameron: 1995). In more popular outlines of Reformation history, such as De Lamar Jensen’s Reformation Europe: Age of Reform and Revolution, the Reformation in Eastern Europe is hardly mentioned, with no separate chapter devoted to this region (Jensen: 1992). The story of how the continent of Europe came to be conceived as divided into Western Europe and Eastern Europe was presented by Larry Wolff in his fascinating book entitled Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilisation on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Wolff: 1994). Wolff presents many examples of how Eastern Europe was perceived by Western historiography : usually with prejudice, disrespect and ignorance. One of the most representative examples of such an approach to Eastern European early modern history is a book by Albert Frederick Pollard on The Jesuits in Poland, published by Blackwell in 1892 but reprinted without any changes in New York in 1971 (Pollard: 1971). It would seem to be an easy and

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perhaps unnecessary task to discuss a historical book published more than a hundred years ago, even if such a book is full of mistakes and misunderstandings. The situation changes, however, when such a book is reprinted with no corrections, no introduction or appendix, and no indication that its content has long been superseded by serious scholarship. This is the case with A. F. Pollard’s work on Polish Jesuits. It was originally published by Blackwell in Oxford and major libraries have copies available for those interested in curiosities. A reader acquainted with the historical scholarship of Pollard, “the leading Tudor scholar of the early twentieth century”, might expect The Jesuits in Poland to be another carefully researched work. Pollard wrote studies which are considered models of careful and enduring work: The History of England from the Accession of Edward VI to the Death of Elizabeth, 1547–1603 (1910), Thomas Cranmer and the English Reformation (1904), The Elizabethans and the Empire (1921), and Wolsey (1929). He is also the author of several selections of source documents, including The Reign of Henry VII from Contemporary Sources (1913). The author who elsewhere displays expertise in locating sources writes a book on Polish history with no knowledge of either the Polish language or sources in Polish. He quotes a few Polish sources in Latin, but most of them have been proven unreliable. He makes no effort to acquaint himself with any books or documents not available at the Bodleian Library, which even now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, is not the best place to study Polish history and literature. With what amounts to blatant contempt for a nation that lacked political sovereignty at the time, Pollard seems to take advantage of his potential readers’ total ignorance of Polish history, and regales them with stories and interpretations unworthy of the great scholar that he otherwise was. Pollard laboured under a colonialist assumption that small and medium-sized nations should naturally be conquered by large ones, and that their historical sources and languages are not worth studying. From this point of view, the languages and sources provided by the conquerors, in this case Russian and German, are sufficient research tools for historians. One hopes that no contemporary scholar involved in serious research on Polish history would presume to study that history without knowledge of the Polish language, at least to the extent that she or he could exploit basic primary and secondary sources published in Poland. Alas, as I have just mentioned, the authors of general histories of the Reformation still think that they can write whole chapters on the Eastern European Reformation with no knowledge of the original sources and secondary literature published in their countries of interest – Hungary, Poland or the Czech Republic. The textbook of The European Reformation mentioned above is a case in point.

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2.3.3 Antitrinitarianism/Socinianism in Polish Historiography – an Evolution of Attitudes There are many issues concerning Eastern European antitrinitarianism and Socinianism that should be discussed with new, fresh research on primary sources and critical reconsideration of secondary sources. The story of antitrinitarianism and Socinianism in Poland is one of the most intriguing stories in the history of the Reformation and so one should regret that such distinguished historians as A. F. Pollard were never seriously interested in telling this story to British and other Western European audiences. In the 1560s, the period when the Church of England was approving the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, when English troops were occupying Le Havre in France in aid of the Huguenots, and when John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was published, the whole Christian community in Poland was being challenged by the crisis in the Polish Calvinist church after the death in 1560 of Jan Łaski (known in England as John a Lasco), a figure significant for both the Polish and English Reformations. Deprived of the powerful and dedicated leadership of Łaski, the Polish Reformed Church soon produced an offshoot, the so-called Minor Church, where dissident ministers practised their antitrinitarian and anabaptist beliefs. John Calvin himself became very concerned about the situation, as evidenced by his letters to the leaders of the Polish Reformed Church (de Greef: 2008). Supported by Italian Protestants such as Giorgio Biandrata and later, from the 1570s, by Fausto Sozzini, a group of Polish Reformed pastors formed the most radical and theologically sophisticated heresy of the Reformation period (cf. e. g. Kot: 1957, Williams: 1978). The term Socinianism is misleading and in some way anachronistic, because Socinus entered an already well-established Minor Church, one that had been in existence for over ten years, and because there were many other important theologians in this church both before his arrival in Poland and during his stay. There were influential theologians active after the death of Socinus who did not share many of his theological views: Johann Crell, Andrzej Wiszowaty, Johann Ludwig Wolzogen, Joachim Stegmann the Elder, Samuel Przypkowski and others. The dissidents called themselves the Polish Brethren or simply Christians; their enemies called them Arians because of alleged connections with the ancient heresy of Arianism. The name “Arians” (in Polish: arianie) and the notion of “Arianism” (arianizm), although confusing and irrelevant, have remained very popular in Polish scholarship up to the present day. We may say that in general the antitrinitarianism of the Polish Brethren was similar to the views of Miguel Servetus, burned at the stake in Calvinist Geneva. A rejection of infant baptism and of service in the army (especially in the early and most radical period) was reminiscent of the most extreme examples of

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European anabaptism. The repudiation of the divinity of Jesus Christ (according to the Brethren, Jesus was a human being made divine by God after death in recognition of his merits) and of the co-equal divinity of Christ and the Father caused some people to assume that they were not Christians. Socinus and his followers also denied a number of other Catholic and/or Protestant beliefs, such as original sin, predestination, vicarious atonement and justification by faith. This radical and exclusively Scriptural theology was based on a rationalistic interpretation of Scripture; it rejected many fundamental principles of traditional Christian theology including the statements of the first Councils. It presented a serious challenge not only for the Roman Catholics but also for Calvinists and Lutherans. The theological concepts of Socinianism have their roots in the theology of the Reformed Church, where most of the antitrinitarian theologians had served as ministers before they joined the new Church of the Polish Brethren. Polish antitrinitarian ideas were also indebted to European anabaptist theology and of course to the original ideas of radical Italian heretics such as Faustus Socinus. No major research on early antitrinitarian theology in Poland has yet been done, especially as far as links to Reformed theology are concerned. This is a very interesting problem and I hope that a major comparative study of the theological ideas of the Polish Brethren in the early stages of the development of their doctrine will be prepared by those who are interested in the changes of antitrinitarian doctrines in Early Modern Europe from the 1560s to the theological and philosophical debates of the late 17th century. In the ongoing discussion on intellectual networks in Central/Eastern and Western Europe there is one aspect worth further investigation. As I have pointed out, there exists no reliable secondary literature on Polish antitrinitarianism published in English. For this reason it would be very useful to give an account of research undertaken in Polish historiography on Socinianism and related issues from the 1930s up to the present. The achievements of this historiography have hardly been taken into account by historians of the European Reformation; the extensive scholarly output of Polish historians has rarely been included in the footnotes of major Reformation textbooks. As a result of this “iron curtain”, European scholarship was really divided into Western and Eastern blocs with no significant communication process between them. Socinianism is not a term very often used by Polish historians. As I have mentioned above, the Polish antitrinitarians called themselves the Polish Brethren, or simply Christians, and the names “Polish Brethren” and “Arians” have been most often used by Polish historians without reference to the preSocinian, Socinian and post-Socinian period of their activities. The term Socinianism has never been frequently used in Polish historiography, even in discussions about the seventeenth century.

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It is worth mentioning at the beginning of this survey that, paradoxically, the best, most objective and most complete encyclopaedia entry to be found on the Polish Brethren is contained in the second volume of The Catholic Encyclopedia, published by the Catholic University of Lublin and endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church as its official publication (Gjrski: 1985). The author of this entry was Konrad Gjrski, a distinguished historian of Polish literature who represents what I would call the philological-historical-archival model of research on the Polish Brethren. His books are important examples of this research model, whose most significant feature is the attempt to study carefully the development of the Church of the Polish Brethren and how theological thinking evolved, based upon original archival materials and new research. In his monograph on Gregorius Paulus of Brzeziny, Gjrski presented the origin and growth of antitrinitarianism. His magisterial essay Humanism and Antitrinitarianism demonstrated how close were the links between pre-Socinian thought and humanism, especially the version represented by Erasmus of Rotterdam. Gjrski’s two books, published in 1929 and 1949, mark the beginning and the end of a twenty-year period important not only in the study of antitrinitarianism, but in Polish historical, literary and cultural studies as a whole. The 1920s marked the beginning of modern research on antitrinitarianism. By the end of the 1940s reinterpretations connected with the introduction of the ideology of dialectical and historical materialism had begun to appear as a result of political pressures imposed by the Communist party on the academic community. Before characterising the “communist” stage of research on Socinianism, I will describe briefly the period between the publication of these two books by Gjrski, i. e. between the 1920s and 1940s. This period was dominated by the work of the research school associated with Stanisław Kot, the author of The Political and Social Ideology of the Polish Brethren, Also Known as the Arians (Warsaw, 1932), a major synthetic study on the political and social ideas of the movement (cf. Urban: 2001). The studies of Kot and his students are impressive examples of erudition and deep knowledge of historical sources, and demonstrate significant objectivity, even though some of the authors were involved in left-wing politics. Some of them became professors in post-war Poland and followed the prewar, non-Marxist research model. The leading examples were Ludwik Chmaj, a historian of philosophy and the author of a monograph on Faustus Socinus, and Alodia Kawecka-Gryczowa, another member of the above-mentioned group of Kot’s students and author of The Arian Printing Presses of Rodecki and Sternacki: History and Bibliography (1974) – still today an indispensable guide to research for everyone interested in Socinian prints. The transition from the prewar to the postwar period did not, however,

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happen painlessly. From 1948 to 1956 Marxist ideology in its Stalinist version was imposed upon all spheres of life, and especially upon scholarly work and education. A unique combination of naive political beliefs of left-wing intellectuals, the fear of the omnipresent political police, and a natural need to have a sense of fulfillment in professional life resulted in the political-ideological model of research, an Eastern European phenomenon which was so ubiquitous that it even influenced classical studies. During the communist rule in Poland ancient culture and classical tradition were criticised as ideologically hostile. Latin was denounced as the language of the Roman Catholic Church and of classical Western culture, even while some aspects of the classical tradition, misrepresented and used in a very selective way, were considered valuable for communist ideology (cf. Karsai: 2013). For the communist policy makers the Polish Brethren in the pre-Socinian period were progressive, anti-Catholic activists who were fighting for social justice against the feudal system; and in the post-Socinian period, after being expelled from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, they became the model victims of Catholic bigotry and intolerance. It is obvious that the situation was much more complicated, but the communists needed the Socinians as examples in their propaganda, especially against the Roman Catholic Church. For that reason a lot of funding was given to research and publishing projects examining the history and literature of the Polish antitrinitarians from the point of view of Stalinist-Marxist ideology. Theology (like Classics and Latin) was a problem but the so-called progressive views of the Polish Brethren served as a political argument and their theological component was hardly mentioned. Even the scholars who later became distinguished professors in their fields produced – especially at the beginning of their academic careers – books and articles that did not make any significant contribution to knowledge of the Polish Brethren, but served the new ideology. One of the greatest authorities on Polish Socinianism, Zbigniew Ogonowski, summing up his opinions about this period in historical research wrote: In the 1950s there appeared not a single work that increased in any significant way the corpus of archival resources on important issues. A particular interest in the years 1950–1954 in Arian social and political ideology, especially its radical form, did not result in fundamental archival studies. This interest as a rule manifested itself in interpretation which was based on the ideology of historical materialism and on the study of archival materials that had been collected earlier (…). Even the most ambitious works of this type are – I do not hesitate to use this word – dilettantish as far this area of study is concerned, sometimes even extremely dilettantish (Ogonowski: 1971).

This criticism of the ideological research model of the Stalinist era is quite mild and euphemistic, taking into consideration the scale and the harmfulness of this

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phenomenon in Polish academia. These words were written, however, in 1971, when all such statements were still subject to censorship, and when, moreover, a similar, neo-Marxist research model continued to prevail in scholarly work, although in a less ideological form than previously. Besides, this criticism was also directed at the former scholarly achievements of the author himself. We might conjecture that after 1956 research on the Polish Brethren could advance to a new stage, no longer subjected to Stalinist ideological pressures. Did these studies return, however, to the prewar research model? Of course they did not, although there were some connections with pre-war research. The books of Kot’s student Ludwik Chmaj were published, and new research projects were undertaken. For example, in 1958 a collection of essays edited by Chmaj, Studies on Arianism, was published “to mark the 300th anniversary (…) of the Brethren’s banishment from Poland” (Chmaj: 1959). And although the choice of this anniversary obviously led to the choice of topics, which were supposed to be critical of Catholicism or “the feudal state”, in keeping with the principles of the communist government in Poland, the results were very impressive and the volume contains many valuable papers based on archival research. Unfortunately, in the 1960s and 1970s such valuable studies of Polish antitrinitarianism could not avoid an ideological stamp, as revealed in a passage from an article by Janusz Tazbir, published in 1960: “Currently we emphasize (…) the rationalism of the Arians, their demands for tolerance and the separation of church and state, i. e. ideas of current interest in the recent ideological struggle”. Interestingly, in this article there was at the same time a suggestion to abandon the research model that was promoted during the Stalinist era: Instead of suggesting that the Arians were the ideologues of the peasant war, which was impossible in Renaissance Poland, it would be better to pay greater attention to what was truly revolutionary in their doctrine – their understanding of the relation of man and the state and the secular and church authorities, their cult of physical labour, and their condemnation of social exploitation (Tazbir : 1960).

In the same article, moreover, Tazbir emphasised – as indeed did Zbigniew Ogonowski in the article cited earlier in this essay – the need for research on the theology of the Polish Brethren, and not only on social and political matters. His remarks still, however, represent the position of a post-Stalinist Marxism in its lighter version, and serve as an example of a very special form of hypocrisy, worth further analysis for which there is no time at present. It must be recognised that from the end of the 1960s, although academic research remained completely constrained by the Communist authorities, studies on Socinianism began adopting a research model which I would call the philosophical-historical model. Studies of this type effaced the difference between theology and philosophy, and scholars more willingly discussed the

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philosophy of the Polish Brethren than their theology. Although the origin of this approach is obviously political, it can be justified because the philosophical context and philosophical implications of this theology are obvious to everyone who studies Socinian writings. There is no reason, however, in normal circumstances to pretend that theological works are not theological but only philosophical. Such an approach was of course not the case in the works of the most distinguished scholars in this field, philosophers Lech Szczucki and Zbigniew Ogonowski. In historical studies the most significant works were published by Janusz Tazbir, who never attempted to avoid, however, a postMarxist approach to the study of the Reformation, paying almost no attention to its theological and intellectual significance and emphasising the social and political dimension of the Reformation movement (cf. e. g. Tazbir : 1959, 1986, 1987, 1993, 1996). It must be said that – paradoxically – the influence of communist politics on studies in the humanities encouraged the development of research on the Polish Brethren in the years 1956–1970. After 1960 not a single work appeared on the Polish Brethren that had a specifically political or ideological character, and the “philosophical-historical” research model served as the basis for many important studies in the field (cf. e. g. Szczucki: 1964, Szczucki, Tazbir : 1959; Ogonowski: 1991, 2015).

2.3.4 Conclusion: No Breakthrough after the Fall of Communism One might logically assume that because of the political changes in Poland in the 1980s and 1990s there would have been more intensive research on the Polish Brethren conducted by scholars associated with the Roman Catholic Church, especially by priests specialising in Church history and theology. One might also assume that this point of view, along with the access to new sources that became possible, might be not just promising but also dangerous because of potential ideological influences of a different kind – no longer Marxist, but Catholic. Yet in point of fact the results were neither promising nor dangerous. Two books by Father Jerzy Misiurek on the Christology of the Polish Brethren which appeared in the early 1980s significantly broadened our knowledge of the theology of the Polish Brethren, by presenting in an objective and multifaceted way the preSocinian foundations of that theology (Misiurek: 1983, 1984). However, no more works of this kind were published in Catholic circles. Secular historians generally failed to set new directions for research. The only exception was the work of Sławomir Radon´, On the History of Anti-Arian Polemics in Poland in the 16th and 17th Centuries (1993) – a PhD thesis which did not lead to any further research by its author in this field. Between 1994 and 2010 only three mono-

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graphic studies on the Polish Brethren authors were published – on Erazm Otwinowski, Szymon Budny and Stanisław Lubieniecki (Wilczek: 1994, Kamieniecki: 2002, Tazbir 2003; cf. Tazbir 1961). This brief account of the research models for antitrinitarianism and Socinianism in Poland should make it apparent that the ongoing research on this topic needs a new stage in its development, new scholars and new methods. A monumental volume in Polish on Socinianism: Its History, Views, Influences by Zbigniew Ogonowski (Ogonowski: 2015) is merely an impressive summary of the achievements of this eminent scholar, with no new sources discussed. One main conclusion can be drawn after reviewing the role of Socinianism in contemporary historiography : the Polish Reformation, including the Radical Reformation, still needs intensive research based on careful examination of both primary and secondary sources, which should be made available to international scholars.

2.4

The Major Concepts of Antitrinitarian Theology in the 16th Century

2.4.1 Introduction English-speaking scholars interested in the history of the Radical Reformation in Poland, especially the Antitrinitarian movement, can find much useful unformation in two indispensable works by George Huntston Williams. Those curious about its origin can read an interesting article by James Miller published in 1985 in the Sixteenth Century Journal and entitled “The Origins of Polish Arianism”. Miller’s study remains a valuable source from the historical point of view. By contrast, there exists no systematic description of early Antitrinitarian theology in Poland from when it first appeared in the 1560s to the beginning of the seventeeth century. Therefore this chapter will be devoted to the first stages of this theology which emerged in opposition to the theology of Reformed and other Protestant communities. In the previous chapter I presented basic introductory information about the origin of the church of the Polish Brethren and discussed various myths associated with its activities. In this chapter I will concentrate on major theological concepts of this radical Reformation community. As Sarah Mortimer rightly observed, “no adequate account exists at present of the Socinians’ ideas”. Indeed, her own“new interpretation of the Socinians’ thought”, while very valuable in itself, fails to fill this gap on two counts: firstly, it does not include primary and secondary sources written in Polish, despite the

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equal value of both Polish and Latin sources for the first phase of Polish Socinianism/antitrinitarianism; secondly, it merely forms the introduction to an otherwise broader-themed dissertation on Reason and Religion in the English Revolution. The present book, on the other hand, is devoted to Polish Christianity, and our interest in Socinian thought – both because of polemics with Catholics and the poetry of Erazm Otwinowski – concentrates on the earlier period, up to the 1610s. I decided to offer my own presentation of antitrinitarian/ Socinian thought both for this reason, and also in order to emphasise the fact that there was a pre-Socinian period in the development of this doctrine, even before Socinus himself arrived in Poland. In the 1560s and 70s their doctrine, with its strict basis in the Gospel, was especially radical from a social point of view. They condemned all military involvement and serving in the army, and did not recognise public offices and courts, oaths, and indeed the power of the state in general. They established small communities in many towns and villages but the city of Rakjw was their main centre, famous as a cultural and educational capital with an excellent school and publishing house. Here many theological and philosophical books were published, among them the Racovian Catechism. This catechism became famous at the beginning of the 17th century when it was translated into Latin and published with a dedication to James I, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland. In it the translator tried to convince the English King that the Catechism contained “divine truth itself, which is perceived in Scripture”. James, however, was offended, and the Catechism was publicly burned in London in 1614 by order of Parliament (see below, chapter 2.6). The Polish Brethren organised numerous synods where all members of the church freely discussed various theological issues – something completely unusual not only in the Roman Catholic Church but also in Lutheran and Calvinist congregations. They lived modest lives but their views on luxuries, wealth, and especially on offices and war did change over the years. Their social views became more moderate, since many members of the church were noblemen who wanted to be active citizens as well. Faustus Socinus was especially active in the 1580s and 90s in moderating the social doctrine of the church. He favoured paying taxes, acknowledging public offices and taking part in defensive wars. It is worth mentioning that only the Brethren from southern Poland had adopted the most extreme doctrinal positions. Those from the north-eastern part of the Commonwealth never favoured such unorthodox social views and some of them even praised slavery because in their opinion it, too, could be justified from the Bible, especially from the Old Testament. It would be very difficult to offer in a short essay an outline of Socinian theology ; what I will do is attempt to present how the Polish Brethren understood certain major ideas of Christian theology. No comprehensive dictionary or

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textbook devoted to early Socinian theology has been published so far, and we should be aware that without reconstructing the major theological ideas of the Polish Brethren it will be impossible both to understand their religious experience and to study the numerous literary works published by Socinian writers. Let me present a brief attempt to reconstruct the major concepts of early antitrinitarian theology as an invitation to further research on this topic.

2.4.2 The Bible For the Polish Brethren, the Bible was the only authentic source of Christian doctrine. Representative Brethren views on Biblical authority can be found in one of the polemical works by Marcin Czechowic written against the Catholic priest Father Hieronim Powodowski: the Word of God is the only certain, exclusive and exhaustive source of Christian faith (cf. Czechowic: 1583). Scripture cannot be understood by means of science or even by reason, through interpretation neither by the Pope nor even by the church, but through Christ the teacher himself. More subtle conclusions are included by Socinus in his early work De Sacrae Scripturae auctoritate (On the Authority of the Holy Scripture), written under the influence of his correspondence with Andreas Dudith. Socinus suggests various arguments, each aimed at a particular audience – for Christians (the philological-historical method), non-Christians (the historical method) and atheists (rational arguments). Both in the above-mentioned work and in his later treatise entitled Lectiones sacrae, quibus auctoritas Sacrarum literarum, praesertim Novi Foederis asseritur (Sacred Lessons in which the Authority of the Holy Scripture and Especially the New Testament is Defended – 1602), the basis of the argument is that no Church authority is necessary to defend the authority of the Bible. Scriptural pre-eminence has its source in the Bible itself and the authority of the Old Testament is verified by the authority of the New Testament. The higher assessment of the New Testament was a common opinion among the Antitrinitarian theologians. As Czechowic said, “the Old Testament is only a shadow of the New” (Czechowic: 1581). For his part, Socinus was convinced that thanks to God’s Providence the Holy Scriptures were in no part distorted. Accordingly, acknowledging biblical authority is the only means to find the path to eternal salvation (Socinus, Letter to A. Dudith, June 10, 1582, cf. Socinus: 1959). This confidence in the Bible as the only source of faith was intensified by an animus to any philosophy and, for that matter, to the whole post-biblical commentary tradition (“We confine ourselves to the Holy Scipture and do not need that support” – Statorius: 1595). This rule led the Polish Brethren to “extreme biblicism, biblical verbalism, using exclusively biblical terminology” (Misiurek: 1983). The problem of translating the Bible into vernacular languages

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is closely connected. The antitrinitarian translations into Polish were based on the textus receptus. There was a tendency to acknowledge the achievements of Erasmus of Rotterdam and treat the 1550 edition of the textus receptus published by Robert Estienne as the canonical version of Scripture; there was no desire among the Brethren to be involved in further philological research on the Bible. There were several debates in the Church on methods of reading the Bible that reduce it more or less to the verbal/literal. Generally speaking, the Polish Brethren accepted the rules of interpretation included in the early treatise by Socinus, Explicatio primi partis primi capitis Evangelistae Johannis (Explanation of the First Part of the First Chapter of St. John’s Gospel), which was heavily influenced by Erasmus: 1. the comparative method (explaining less clear passages of the Bible using clearer passages); 2. the method of philological exegesis (fixing the meaning of words in relation to the whole context); 3. the rationalistic method (the rule of conformity with reason).

2.4.3 Christology The Christology of the Polish Brethren was closely connected to the problem of the Holy Trinity. From the end of the 16th century onward it was exclusively unitarian. Christology as the doctrine defining the divine and human nature of Jesus Christ was the pivotal issue for all theological controversies provoked by the Minor Church. The Confession of Chalcedon provides a clear statement on the human and divine nature of Christ, as challenged by the Brethren. The Polish Brethren argued that, first, it is not that the Son of God became a man, but that Jesus Christ was a human being made the Son of God by the Father. Not accepting the possibility of the existence of God and man in one person and one hypostasis, they claimed that Christ was a man begotten by the Holy Spirit, born of Mary and made divine by God in recognition of his merits. The Polish Brethren were not unanimous as to the moment at which Jesus became God. Where they were agreed was that traditional Christian teaching was contrary to reason. Their rationalistic approach to christological matters is especially visible in the writings of Socinus; the earlier theologians of the Polish Brethren, such as Czechowic, stress the practical and moral concerns represented by the divine and human nature of Christ. The second christological problem is the preexistence of Christ. The Polish Brethren claimed that the first moment of the Son of God’s existence was the Annunciation. This issue was discussed at many synods but without any unanimous conclusion. Some of these theologians claimed that Jesus was the Son of Joseph and tried to find Scriptural evidence. In this case the most difficult passage for interpretation was, of course, the beginning of St. John’s Gospel.

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Attempts were therefore made to produce translations consistent with their interpretation. The famous translation of “logos” as “sermo” and not “verbum” by Erasmus was used as one of the arguments. The third christological issue was the problem of Jesus Christ as the Saviour and his sacrifice on the cross. Its implications were discussed in one of the most important works of Socinus, De Iesu Christo servatore (On Jesus Christ the Saviour), which is undoubtedly his most original contribution to theology. The essence of this work is the following: Christ is called the Redeemer not because he took on punishment for the sins of humankind, thereby alleviating the wrath of God, but because he showed humanity the path to eternal salvation, which can be attained by imitating him. In his four discourses Socinus also elaborated his teachings on justification, which were summarised by Ludwik Chmaj in this manner : God in His benevolence sent Christ to the world to reveal His will to men. Christ offered his death so that God may grant forgiveness for the sins of humankind, but to say that Christ died for us does not mean, as many think, that he died so we may live, but that he died because of us and for our sins. The blood of Christ had no mysterious power to cleanse men of their sin. By his sacrifice on the cross, Christ has gained eternal life for himself and for his followers, in accordance with God’s promise, and attained, through his blood and death, the forgiveness of our sins […]. God accepts us as justified solely because of His good will, and His forgiveness of our sins demands of us that we trust in Christ and live according to his teachings. Humankind should be disposed to submission to Christ by his miraculous works which bear witness to his teaching, by his freely taking on death, and by his resurrection (Chmaj: 1963).

The theological views of Faustus Socinus are not representative of the whole church of the Polish Brethren, whose members did not discuss this difficult issue very often. But one of the prominent theologians of the church, Jan Niemojewski, did start a polemic with Socinus. Niemojewski followed the traditional view that Jesus Christ through his death on the cross sacrificed himself to God for humankind and their sins. The views of Socinus were developed mainly by Petrus Statorius the Younger, who emphasised that human salvation is first of all the work of God the Father (cf. Statorius: 1595).

2.4.4 The Holy Trinity The views of the Polish Brethren theologians on the Holy Trinity were purely Antitrinitarian. They questioned the dogma of the Trinity formulated by the Church Fathers and accepted by the First Council of Nicea in 325 and the First Council of Constantinople in 381. The antitrinitarian theologians argued that there is no direct evidence in the Bible in favour of this dogma. Some of them

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used the case of the famous Johannine Comma, perhaps the clearest and apparently least ambiguous expression of the doctrine of the Trinity in the New Testament (cf. McDonald: 2016). Let us now recall two famous lines from The First Epistle General of John, Chapter 5: Line 7: “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one”.

This line is usually presumed to be a later interpolation as a reinforcement of the meaning of the next line, which is in all manuscripts: Line 8: “And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one”.

In his fundamental work about the development of the Christian doctrine, Jaroslav Pelikan briefly describes the circumstances: On the basis of the manuscript evidence available to him, Erasmus had eliminated the passage from his first edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516, but had restored it in later editions, responding to a storm of protest and to further textual evidence that was produced – quite literally, produced – in support of the text (Pelikan: 1985).

Erasmus actually restored the comma in the 1522 edition and discussed the whole issue in his Annotationes in Novum Testamentum, in which he confirmed the great theological role of this passage: “Nunc his verbis Ioannes asseruit eandem essentiam patris & filii & spiritus sancti. Principio quod colligunt verissimum est, patris & filii & spiritus sancti eandem esse naturam simplicissimam & individuam” (Erasmus: 1540). In Poland, the “Johannine comma” was questioned by several Antitrinitarian authors including Giorgio Biandrata in his De falsa et vera unius Dei cognitione, and in another work written by Biandrata and Franciscus David entitled Refutatio scripti Georgii Maioris. Polish Calvinists, such as Stanisław Sarnicki, claimed that there were Greek manuscripts in which the passage existed (cf. Gjrski: 1949). For the antitrinitarians, the argument that the only direct biblical evidence for the Trinity is a forgery was very important, but there were of course other antitrinitarian arguments against the doctrine of the Trinity, based on their Christology discussed above. It is interesting, however, that their doctrine was not unitarian from the very beginning. In the first period of its development, tritheistic views were promoted, emphasising the autonomy and absolute distinction of the three persons. This was an attempt, made for example by Gregorius Paulus of Brzeziny, to return to biblical language and to reject scholastic terminology. In this view the idea of monotheism remained, thanks to the rule of the Father’s “pre-eminence”. There was also another idea discussed in the early

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stages of doctrinal development, that of “ditheism” – that is, only the Father and the Son are divine and the Holy Spirit is not (see the works of Jan Niemojewski, Marcin Czechowic). The final version of the antitrinitarianism of the Polish Brethren was unitarianism – only the Father is divine and Jesus was a human being. Some unitarians were supporters of the adoration of Christ and others were opposed to it, calling it idolatry.

2.4.5 Nonadorantism The problem of nonadorantism was very important for the Polish Brethren. This is the idea that praying to Christ and paying him homage is wrong because Christ is only human. Francis David, who had been a Calvinist bishop of the Hungarian Churches, founded the unitarian church in Transylvania. A supporter of nonadorantism, he was convicted of heresy and sent to prison after his public debates with Georgio Biandrata. David’s conviction was supported by Faustus Socinus. After his invitation to Transylvania, Socinus engaged in frequent debate with David, who received help from another theologian, Jacobus Paleologus. Socinus wrote his arguments in the form of a treatise entitled On the Invocation of Jesus Christ (De Jesu Christi invocatione disputatio), which was published in Krakjw in 1579. As Marian Hillar has pointed out: His main argument was that the invocation of Christ from which his adoration derives is necessary as a cognition of his rule and power over men that he obtained directly from God. Just as the power given by God to man over nature constitutes his resemblance to God, so the power given by God to Christ constitutes his divinity. For this reason Christ should be adored, though otherwise he remains a true man. For Socinus the non-adoration of Christ would be equivalent to a return to Judaism. However, adoration is not expressly prohibited or ordered by Scripture (Hillar: 2002).

The synods of the Polish Brethren were involved in the debate. At the synod held in Bełz˙yce in 1579, the year of David’s imprisonment and death, the Brethren passed a resolution against David and nonadorantism entitled Iudicum ecclesiarum Polonicarum de cause Francisci Davidis. There was another debate on this issue between Socinus and a former Jesuit turned unitarian theologian, Christian Francken, in 1583. The Latin catechism of the Polish Brethren published in 1574 (Catechesis et confessio fidei…) strongly recommended praying to Jesus Christ and paying him homage. Mainstream unitarian doctrine always followed this rule, acknowledging the fact that – according to their theology – Jesus was made divine by God after his death. This interpretation produced another polemic between Faustus Socinus and Jan Niemojewski. Socinus claimed that there are issues necessary and unnecessary for salvation and

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adoration of Christ is not necessary to be saved. Niemojewski claimed that as far as salvation is concerned, such distinctions are damaging and should not be used. Whether to adore Jesus Christ was one of the unitarian Church’s major debates in 16th-century Poland and Transylvania.

2.4.6 Predestination The problem of predestination must be mentioned here since it is one of the most important issues in Calvinist theology. The views of the Polish Brethren on the idea of predestination changed over time. In the pre-Socinian period, before Socinus became a key figure of antitrinitarian theology, the Polish Brethren followed the approach of the Confessio Helvetica, contrary to the majority of Polish Protestants at that time, who did not approve this idea with much enthusiasm. An example of support for the concept of predestination can be found in Christian Conversations (Rozmowy chrystyjan´skie) by Marcin Czechowic (1575). By contrast, Socinus strongly rejects predestination in his Praelectiones theologicae of 1592. An interesting exchange of correspondence had taken place in 1580–1583 between Socinus and Niemojewski about the seventh chapter of the Letter to the Romans. This exchange, which was published in 1583, provides us with background information to the evolution of views on predestination. We can see the anthropological pessimism of Niemojewski on the one hand and, on the other, the optimistic views in the letters of Socinus regarding the possibilities for human spiritual improvement. According to Niemojewski, the man described by St. Paul is Paul himself, a reborn Christian, who nevertheless cannot do the good he desires but only the evil he does not want to commit and thus has to fall because his body is stronger than the spirit. According to Socinus, St. Paul is speaking here about a man who is still not reborn as a Christian, because a Christian and a reborn man is able perfectly to obey the commandments of God. Their detailed cross-examination of one chapter of the Letter to the Romans was in fact a debate between two ideas of Christianity and two anthropologies.

2.4.7 Baptism There are two more major theological issues important to the ongoing theological debates – baptism and the Eucharist. The Church of the Polish Brethren was one of numerous anabaptist communities in Europe at that time. The rejection of infant baptism was, however, not the only issue. A second questioned whether renewed baptism of those who were already baptised as children is really necessary and acceptable. The first anabaptist public speech in Poland was

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delivered by Peter of Gonia˛dz (Piotr z Gonia˛dza) at the Calvinist synod in Brest in 1558 (included in the lost book entitled Libri contra paedobaptismum – Books against infant baptism). Various anabaptist ideas were propagated in the community of the Polish Brethren. The most representative work in this vein is a 14chapter treatise by Marcin Czechowic, De paedobaptistarum errorum origine. Its most important parts are as follows: a polemic with the views of John Calvin; a description of the anabaptist model of the Church as a community in direct continuation of early Christianity ; a polemic with the idea of original sin; a critique of Catholic and Protestant rituals and ceremonies; and an extensive discussion of the anabaptist argument that baptism without faith has no meaning and for that reason infant baptism is useless. The view of Faustus Socinus that renewed baptism through immersion is not necessary to be accepted into the community of the Polish Brethren threatened the very idea of anabaptists as a community based on baptism through immersion. For that reason many antitrinitarian theologians challenged Socinus. Socinus explained his position in his work De baptismo acque disputatio (1580). He based his argument on his concept of issues necessary and unnecessary for salvation; renewed baptism was, according to him, not necessary for salvation. This work was attacked by Marcin Czechowic, one of the most renowned preSocinian theologians. Socinus explained his position in numerous letters to many distinguished members of the community. This dispute with the elders produced the following paradox: Socinus, the most distinguished theologian of the Minor Church, did not become a member of that Church until 1602 when he championed the synod resolution that members of other Christian confessions could be accepted into the Polish Brethren without renewed baptism. The resolution was made at the time when Krzysztof Lubieniecki and Valentin Schmalz, both much influenced by Socinus, assumed major positions after the retirement of the now aged theologians Czechowic and Niemojewski. This resolution, however, did not completely stop the disputes over renewed baptism.

2.4.8 Eucharist The views of the Polish Brethren on another important sacrament, the Eucharist, were also not consistent. Although transubstantiation was obviously rejected, we can still find many different opinions in the works of the Polish Brethren theologians. Generally speaking, the majority of the Brethren shared the Eucharist theology of Huldrich Zwingli – the so-called symbolic view according to which, in “This is my body”, “is” meant “signifies”. There was, nevertheless, a dispute between Niemojewski, whose approach was more Calvinist, and Socinus, who followed Zwingli. In his definition Socinus says:

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In consuming bread and wine during the Lord’s Supper the believers or unbelievers do not accept anything, either in their bodies or in their spirit, except for bread and wine, because the Lord established this ritual not to give us anything but to make us recall what he has given to us and to thank him for that (Socinus: 1618b).

A similar view can be found in The Christian Conversations by Marcin Czechowic. Its Zwinglian attitude was almost unanimously accepted in the church. During the synod in Lublin in 1593, only Jan Niemojewski opposed Socinus’ definition. The problem of the Eucharist is closely connected to the ritual of the Lord’s Supper, which for the Polish Brethren was a common recollection of the Passion of Christ, propagating it until Christ’s second coming. The problem of the Eucharist manifested itself in the biblical studies of the Brethren. For example, Czechowic’s translation of Luke 22:20 was intended to discredit Catholic teaching about transsubstantiation.

2.4.9 Church The ecclesiology of the Polish Brethren questioned the very idea of an institution, including the model of the Reformed Church. Marcin Czechowic’s polemic against the Reformed Catechism written by Paweł Gilowski (1581) provides a case in point. The anabaptist model of the church was based on the notion of a community united by baptism by immersion, the direct continuation of the early Christian community. The Polish Brethren did not accept the highly radical, spiritualist ideas expressed by Matthäus Radecke, a Socinian from Gdan´sk (Danzig). Radecke in his correspondence with Socinus (cf. Socinus: 1959) claimed that it is completely impossible to establish any visible church because, after the time of the apostles, there was complete apostasy, and the establishment of the church was possible only through a special sign from Heaven. According to Socinus, in order to establish the Church the community should truly know and follow Christ’s commandments. The moderate ecclesiology of the Polish Brethren allowed for elected ministers to continue carrying out the external functions of the Church. How to choose Church elders and ministers was also widely debated. It is not surprising that the Polish Brethren questioned the authority of the Pope. Numerous pamphlets discussed the popular idea of the Pope as an Antichrist, although there are no original theological ideas on the issue of papacy in Polish antitrinitarian literature. There were also no original discussions on Matthew 16:18 (“You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church”). The only original statement on the matter can be found in a short commentary by Socinus claiming that the words of Christ were about all the apostles, who were supposed to be the rock (foundation) of the church.

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2.4.10 Conclusions In this brief account I have only been able to mention some of the most important theological ideas of early antitrinitarianism in Poland. There is another set of issues not discussed in this essay, namely, the radical social ideas promoted by the Polish Brethren in the 1560s and 70s. They have been widely discussed in numerous publications including the fundamental monograph Socinianism in Poland by Stanisław Kot published in the United States in 1957 (notabene the title of the Polish version of the book was more adequate: The Political and Social Ideology of the Polish Brethren Called the Arians). I decided to ignore in this presentation the social and political ideas of the Brethren, so closely connected with those of European anabaptism, and to concentrate instead on strictly theological ideas about the Trinity, christology, the Eucharist and predestination. The concepts I have discussed have their roots in the theology of the Reformed Church where most of the antitrinitarian theologians had served as ministers before they joined the new Church of the Polish Brethren. Polish antitrinitarian ideas were also indebted to European Anabaptist theology and to the original ideas of radical Italian heretics such as Socinus who found refuge in Poland and had an opportunity to take part in establishing the new, radical religious community. No major research on early antitrinitarian theology in Poland has yet been done, especially as far as links to Reformed theology are concerned. This is a very interesting problem and I hope that a major comparative study of the theological ideas of the Polish Brethren will be prepared by those who are interested in the development of Christian doctrine in Early Modern Europe and especially in the development of European Calvinism.

2.5

Raków – the Capital of Socinianism: A Unique Case of European Religious Topography in the Age of the Reformation

Janusz Tazbir, a distinguished historian of Polish Reformation, as long ago as 1971 wrote that “it is not easy to write anything new about Rakjw” (Tazbir: 1971). It is obviously much more difficult to write anything new about Rakjw 45 years after these words were written, so the ambition of the author of this essay is not to reveal new discoveries, since no archival research has been done in recent years, but to present Rakjw as a phenomenon of religious topography in the age of the Reformation. This small town established in 1567, built from scratch, in the middle of nowhere, had after half a century become one of the leading intellectual centres of Reformation Europe. This phenomenon, not well known to Western European

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scholars, is worth recalling even when historians have nothing new to add to the history of this place, which was active as a Reformation centre for only 70 years, from 1569 to 1638, but remained in human memory for much longer. Rakjw, an important centre of Polish and European Socinianism and its informal capital in the 16th and 17th centuries, is now a small village in Kielce County (S´wie˛tokrzyskie Voivodeship), in south-central Poland. It lies in historic Lesser Poland, 40 km south-east of the regional capital Kielce, 125 km northeast of Krakjw and 200 km south of Warsaw. The village today has a population of 1,200. Its population in the 16th and 17th centuries was about 2,000. By comparison, the population of Kielce, which now has c. 200,000 inhabitants, was in the 16th century smaller than the population of Rakjw, while the capital, Krakjw, had no more than 30,000 inhabitants (now 760,000), and Warsaw no more than 15,000 (now 1,800,000). This means that Rakjw in its heyday during the Reformation had a significant number of inhabitants when compared with other important centres of that time. Today, less populated than in the 16th century, it is just a small insignificant village with almost no traces of its magnificent past (Urban: 1999). Rakjw became famous in the 17th century across Europe as the capital of Socinianism – a religious movement which had its roots both in Polish Calvinism (the crisis of the 1560s) and in the radical thought of foreign (mostly German and Italian) theologians. These found refuge in tolerant Poland-Lithuania and many of them at the end of the 16th century moved to Rakjw, famous later for its dynamic printing house, the Rakjw Academy and the Racovian Catechism. This is an example of a radical change in religious topography in Central and Eastern Europe, because intellectual and cultural centres of the Reformation emerged there not in larger cities (dependent on Catholic kings) but in small towns which belonged to rich landowners or influential princes who very often were Protestants, usually members of the Evangelical-Reformed Church. One such family were the Radziwiłłs (Radvilas), patrons of the Reformation in the Lithuanian part of the Commonweath and initiators and supporters of many cultural projects such as the Brest Bible (Frost: 2015; Wilczek/ Burton: 2015). The town of Rakjw was established by a Calvinist (Reformed) nobleman, Jan Sienien´ski, on 27 March 1567. In the founding document Sienien´ski included an important statement about religious tolerance, promising that everyone could confess his or her own religion and that the owner of the city would not impose his religion on the inhabitants. Sienien´ski was a Calvinist but his wife, Jadwiga Gnoin´ska, belonged to the antitrinitarian church of the Polish Brethren and his attitude to this community was very favourable. The future settlers were offered numerous economic and tax privileges (Tworek: 1968). This was the period of ongoing debates in the radical circles of the Reformed

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church which finally resulted in the antitrinitarian crisis and the establishment of the minor church of the Polish Brethren. The establishment of Rakjw was a great opportunity for one group of radical Christians, at that time including unitarians, ditheists and even tritheists. For them a new town was an ideal place to establish a community based on the ideals of early Christianity, a real New Jerusalem. Between 1569 and 1572, during this theologically and socially radical period of Polish antitrinitarianism, there was an ongoing series of theological disputes and synods during which the foundations of a new church were being established. Many of these debates were held in Rakjw. At that time the Polish Brethren cooperated closely with radical Communist anabaptists from Moravia, but mutual visits did not lead to any permanent agreement. In 1572 this social and theological chaos was stopped thanks to the organisational skills of Cracow pharmacist Szymon Ronenberg, who managed to reorganise the community, and reintroduce the office of minister and the baptism of adults. Impassioned debates about the Christian attitude to war, the state and state offices, as well as about social and theological issues, led finally to compromises, supported by Faustus Socinus, who moved to Poland in 1579 and frequently visited Rakjw – often for prolonged periods – until his death in 1604. The city of “gentleman apostles”, as the radical Polish Brethren were ironically called during the first phase of the development of the church, did not play an important role until the 1580s; its great development started at the very begining of the 17th century, not only because of its specific role as the Socinian capital: Rakjw was also a significant economic centre (with drapery workshops, a brewing industry, papermaking, furriery, pottery and other industries). Many noble families who belonged to the church of the Polish Brethren settled there and – as I mentioned above – the town had a significant number of inhabitants (c. 2,000), most of them members of the community of Polish Brethren. Increasing numbers of people frequented it in order to take part in the synods of the church (Tworek: 1968; Urban: 1999). Faustus Socinus played a crucial role in making Rakjw the capital of what was later called Socinianism. He introduced a comprehensive reform of the antitrinitarian theology, making it less socially radical and more realistic in its attitudes towards state, wars, offices and lifestyles. The theological works of Socinus, published in Rakjw and discussed at synods and seminars there, are fundamental for the doctrine of the movement. The theology of the community of the Polish Brethren was also shaped during numerous Synods of the church, most of them held in Rakjw and devoted to many organisational and theological issues (Urban: 1999). The new phase of the development of Rakjw started at the end of the 16th century. The founder of the town, Jan Sienien´ski, died in 1599. In the same year his son, Jakub Sienien´ski, converted to antitrinitarianism and continued his

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father’s support of this unique religious centre with great vigour (Cynarski: 1968). Famous and important for the development of antitrinitarian thought were theological seminars chaired by Socinus and held in March 1601 (a one-day event) and October 1602 (twelve days). Participants in both events were members of the antitrinitarian elite, including a few famous foreign theologians. After the death of Socinus this tradition was continued by Valentin Schmalz, who organised for three years theological colloquia called exercitationes theologicae (1606–1609). Rakjw was called by contemporaries an antitrinitarian Rome, an antitrinitarian Geneva or a New Jerusalem (Tync: 1968). It is not a coincidence that two significant cultural and educational initiatives were associated with this small town and had a great influence on Polish and European culture at that time – the Rakjw printing press and the Rakjw Academy. The printing press of Aleksy Rodecki from Krakjw, already famous for publishing numerous antitrinitarian books, was moved to Rakjw in about 1600; in 1602 it was taken over by the founder’s son-in–law Sebastian Sternacki and in 1634 by Sebastian’s son Paweł. This was one of the most resilient and successful printing presses in Reformation Europe. Between 1600 and 1638 Typographia Racoviana published about 200 new titles. Sternacki specialised first of all in theological works of the Polish Brethren, including many works by Socinus, and the famous Racovian Catechism, but he also printed works by Calvinist or even Catholic authors. The Racovian prints were smuggled to England, the Netherlands, Germany and Hungary. Very often Socinian prints published in the 17th century in other countries, such as England, had “Racoviae” on the front page, just to mislead potential enemies. Numerous books and articles on this unique printing press have been published, including a PolishFrench edition of the bibliography of their works, so there is no need to discuss it here in more detail (Kawecka-Gryczowa: 1974). The Racovian Catechism was the most famous imprint of this publishing house. The collective work of Hieronim Moskorzowski, Valentin Schmalz, Johannes Völkel and Pierre Statorius jr., in its first, Polish language edition published in 1605, was a summary of the Socinian period in the development of the doctrine, very much influenced by Socinus himself. Latin, Dutch, German and English translations of its two versions promoted this radical theology all over Europe. Even in the mid-eighteenth century it was still perceived as a dangerous book. For example in 1739 a renowned German Lutheran theologian and biblical scholar, Georg Ludwig Oeder (1694–1760), published a book entitled Catechesis Racoviensis seu Liber Socinianorum primarius. Ad fidem editionis anno MDCIX. This was a complete reprint of the 1609 edition of the Racovian Catechism, not the only confessio fidei of the Socinian/antitrinitarian church of the Polish Brethren but the most famous and comprehensive one. Georg Ludwig Oeder, well known for his numerous theological works, especially on biblical exegesis,

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reprinted the whole first edition of the Latin version of the Catechism – certainly not to promote it but to refute ideas included in this work, which from its first edition was perceived by Catholics, Lutherans and Reformed Christians as a book extremely dangerous for the Christian faith (Wilbur : 1946). Another famous institution associated with Rakjw, the Rakjw Academy (Academia Racoviensis) established in 1602, was not a university (which could be established only by the king’s privilege, unavailable for radical Protestants at that time) but a humanistic gymnasium, a grammar school with very high academic credentials, controlled by the synod. In the Rakjw Academy the following subjects were taught: theology (partly in Polish); foreign languages (Latin, French, Italian and German); rhetoric; ethics; politics and economics; history ; philosophy with special emphasis on logic; natural sciences with elements of medicine; and mathematics with geometry. Some of the textbooks used in the school became famous across Europe, such as Prima ethices elementa by the renowned Socinian philosopher Johann Crell, and a textbook on mathematics by Joachim Stegmann (cf. Salatowsky : 2015). Among the socalled scholars who formed a kind of a board of trustees of the school were numerous distinguished Socinian philosophers and authors : Hieronim Moskorzowski, Valentin Schmalz, Johannes Völkel and many others. Among the rectors of the Racovian Academy we find three famous philosophers of German origin – Johann Crell, Martin Ruar and Joachim Stegmann – and the time of their tenure in office (1616–30) was the most successful period in the history of the Academy. Teachers of the Academy also came from foreign countries, e. g. Italy, Denmark, and the German lands. The total number of students over the 30 years of its existence was about 1000 – both regular students and ordinands (candidates for ministry). After graduating from the Academy, Rakjw students travelled abroad to continue their education, especially at Dutch and German universities. The University of Altdorf was even called a branch or extension of the Rakjw Academy because so many Rakjw graduates studied there (Tync: 1968). Unfortunately, the success story of the city of Rakjw and its Academy ended rapidly and unexpectedly in 1638 as a result of an incident caused by a group of a few Academy students who went for an excursion with two of their teachers. They were accused of throwing stones at a wooden Catholic cross which was located in a neighbouring village on the outskirts of Rakjw. The event was used as a pretext to close the Academy and force the Polish Brethren to leave the city by order of the parliamentary court, to which accusations were made by the Catholic bishop of Cracow, the local governor and the papal nuncio (Tymc: 1968; Urban: 1968). This was the end of the most famous Reformation centre in Poland – a unique community of the radical church and an intellectual movement which, thanks to the Racovian Catechism, the Dutch edition of Bibliotheca

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Fratrum Polonorum and many other works, became world-famous as Socinianism. Rakjw symbolises a radical change in the religious topography of the 16th and th 17 centuries: established in 1567 with the intention of providing a place to live for radical Christians, it became the most important intellectual centre of the Reformation in Central Europe, influencing theologians and philosophers in England, Germany and the Netherlands, not to mention the centres in Transylvania. Rakjw Academy and the Racovian Catechism became symbols of the intellectual quality of radical Christian thought in Reformation Europe. George Huntston Williams recalls in his introduction to Stanisław Lubieniecki’s Historia reformationis Polonicae that Rakjw was called by the Polish Brethren “The Sarmatian Athens” and concludes: “With its academy and two churches, unitarian and Catholic, and renowned polyglot press, Rakjw remained until 1638 a model of what for a time could exist within the bounds of constitutional toleration as still another modality of interfaith irenicism in the Commonwealth” (Williams: 1995). Williams refers to the fact that Rakjw was the site of numerous public disputations between Catholic and Socinian theologians. This role as a centre of interfaith dialogue did not protect the town from the hostility of its Catholic neighbours (Urban: 2012b). The expulsion of the Polish Brethren from Rakjw happened only 20 years before the expulsion of the Brethren from Poland-Lithuania. This second time the pretext was their alleged cooperation with Swedish invaders. After 1658 they found refuge in Ducal and Royal Prussia and in the Netherlands, where Socinian works, often published under the false name of the Rakjw press and printing house, made the town famous throughout the European intellectual world and were read with interest and admiration or fear and hatred: as precursors of the Enlightenment or the most dangerous blasphemies in the Christian world (Tazbir : 1977).

2.6

Liber Socinianorum primarius: Introductory Remarks on the Racovian Catechism

2.6.1 Introduction In early modern Europe there were no works which to a greater extent shaped the world of Christians – whether intellectuals, scholars, dignitaries, princes or men on the street – than catechisms. These primers of every Christian contained the basic principles necessary – as John Boyles put it in his catechisms – “for holy hearing, blessed believing, powerful praying, right receiving, well doing and dying, and life everlasting” (cf. Green: 1996). Ian Green’s book on early modern

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catechisms puts forward a great deal of evidence concerning how important a role catechisms played in shaping the desired value systems in society. Studies on the reception of catechisms, and on their structure and content, are indispensable for the study of the beliefs, values and system of governance of the Church in early modern societies. One might ask why such an important role is played by documents such as catechisms or synodal canons, since there were three basic principles of the Reformation – sola Scriptura, sola fide and sola gratia – and Scripture was recognised as the only authentic source of Christian faith. However, the attitude of the leaders of the Reformation to the sola Scriptura principle was much more complicated. The na"ve optimism which presumed that each believer is able to understand the Scripture was in existence only in the early period and only among the most radical groups. Luther and Calvin realised early enough that there has to be a middle path between the literal reading of the Bible and the adoption of the interpretation proposed by the Roman Catholic Church. The approach they proposed could be called “catechetical”: Small Catechism by Luther and Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion were – as their authors intended – keys to the understanding of the Bible, which was considered to be clear enough to readers if their reading was guided by the Holy Spirit. The history of the Heildelberg Catechism shows how powerful and influential a catechism could be if it served as a religious primer, in this case of the Reformed faith, imposed by a ruler. Calvin’s Institutio was a huge theological treatise and despite its importance in the Reformed tradition it could not become the basis for the teaching of the Bible among all the faithful. Although Calvin is also the author of the Geneva Catechism, one must remember that he was not the only founder of Reformed Christianity, which was shaped also by such important theologians as Martin Bucer, Heinrich Bullinger and Huldrich Zwingli. In these circumstances, when in the second half of the sixteenth century there was an urgent need for the creation of a document in which the Reformed theological doctrine would be stated in an accessible, catechetical way, for the needs of Protestants in the Empire, Friedrich III commissioned an eminent theologian, Zacharias Ursinus, to write the Heidelberg catechism. A second theologian, Caspar Olevianus, may also have participated in its composition. Friedrich’s ambition was ecumenical: the new catechism was intended to be a presentation of the Protestant doctrine including its various traditions, and was based only on the biblical text. However, the Catechism – despite the ecumenical intentions of its initiators and creators – was criticised by “Wittenberg” theologians and has remained a document of faith only for the Reformed church. Although there is no catechism in non-Catholic Christianity more influential than the Heidelberg Catechism, used today in thousands of congregations

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around the world, there was another early modern catechism, almost completely forgotten today, whose role for different reasons was also of great importance for the development of early modern Christianity and – first of all – in its search for identity. The Racovian Catechism, published in central Poland, written by a Pole together with a Frenchmen and two Germans, and under the supervision of an Italian – all refugees to the tolerant Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania – is not only a symbol of international “respublica litteraria” in the Commonwealth but first of all a document of crucial importance for theological debates of the time. The antitrinitarian doctrines, questioning the ideas of the Holy Trinity, the divinity of Jesus Christ and his preexistence, brought these matters to a head, since these three ideas were, and still are, fundamental for Christian theology. However, they were questioned by this radical congregation on the basis of the sola Scriptura rule. The Polish Brethren called themselves “chrystianie”, which was a version of another Polish word, “chrzes´cijanie”, i. e. Christians. Other Christians, however, both Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Reformed, did not recognise them as Christians. The Racovian Catechism – debated and contested in Europe until the 19th century – was in their opinion an example of the most faithful application of the sola Scriptura rule. An excellent brief summary of the first edition of the Racovian Catechism was prepared by Earl Morse Wilbur in Chapter XXX of his History of Unitarianism: Socinianism and its Antecedents (Wilbur : 1946; available online at http://pacificuu.org/wilbur/ahu/book2/31.htm) and could serve as an additional source of reference for readers who would like to become better acquainted with its contents; together with the chapter on The Major Concepts of Antitrinitarian Theology in the 16th Century, Wilbur’s summary may serve as an introduction to the main theological concepts of the pre-Socinian and Socinian phases of the development of the Polish-Lithuanian antitrinitarian doctrine, explaining why this exceptional early modern Polish catechism aroused so much interest, anger and polemical fervour.

2.6.2 Liber Socinianorum primarius In 1739 a renowned German Lutheran theologian and biblical scholar, Georg Ludwig Oeder (1694–1760), published a book entitled Catechesis Racoviensis seu Liber Socinianorum primarius. Ad fidem editionis anno MDCIX. This was a complete reprint of the 1609 edition of the Racovian Catechism, not the only confessio fidei of the Socinian/Antitrinitarian church of the Polish Brethren but the most famous and comprehensive. Georg Ludwig Oeder, famous for his numerous theological works, especially on biblical exegesis, reprinted the whole

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first edition of the Latin version of the Catechism – not to promote it but to refute ideas included in this work, which from its first edition was perceived by Catholics, Lutherans and Reformed Christians as a book extremely dangerous for the Christian faith. Unfortunately, no attention has been paid by scholars to Oeder’s monumental work and the author himself seems to have been completely forgotten. It is very significant that there is an article about Oeder in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie published in 1887, but that the editors of the multi-volume Neue Deutsche Biographie, currently being published, decided not to include him but only his more famous son, Georg Christian Oeder (1728– 1791), a well-known botanist. In his edition, more than 1000 pages long, Oeder printed passages of the Racovian Catechism followed by polemical statements. This is the most comprehensive polemic with the Racovian Catechism ever published. Its publication in the 1730s is clear evidence of how important and dangerous the Socinian heresy was still seen to be in the 18th century on German lands, while in PolandLithuania, where the Catechism was published, no one cared about this work or about the Polish Brethren themselves, who had not been active in the Commonwealth since their expulsion from the country in the 1660s. I have mentioned this monumental, important but completely forgotten work by Oeder for a few reasons. First, because of its relevant subtitle: Liber Socinianorum primarius. Indeed, the Catechism was a principal work of the Socinians. Second, because this book is the most significant example of a German reception of this work. Third, because although Oeder’s work has no recent critical edition or commentary, it is quite symbolic that so far the only contemporary, critical edition of the Racovian Catechism remains an edition of its German version (1608), translated from the Polish version of 1605 (“aus der Polnishen sprach verdeutschet”) by its co-author, a Polish Socinian theologian of German origin, Valentin Schmalz. This critical edition published by Martin Schmeisser in 2012 is accompanied by a comprehensive introduction which explains the role and influence of the Racovian Catechism in the Germanspeaking countries (cf. Schmeisser : 2012). This chapter will not be a comprehensive discussion of the Racovian Catechism. Basic facts and contexts have been discussed in the introduction to the above-mentioned German edition. My intention is to publish an updated list of its editions, summing up all bibliographical debates about this work; to present my opinion about its significance in the Polish context and sum up some facts about its foreign reception; and to propose an international editorial project which will result in a multi-volume edition of Polish, Latin, German, Dutch and English editions of its two versions. Perhaps such a multi-language critical edition is a utopian idea but I believe that it deserves consideration. The Racovian Catechism is one of the most influential texts in the history of Christianity and

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undoubtedly the most significant achievement of religious thought in Central and Eastern Europe.

2.6.3 Bibliographical Summary There are still numerous doubts about dates and places of publication of various language versions of the Racovian catechism. Unfortunately, even in the most recent scholarly publications one can find minor errors, typos and ommisions. The following bibliography collects information scattered in various sources and is an attempt to standardise the Racovian Catechism bibliography. This is not a definitive, conslusive list, since even the existence of all editions is not confirmed. Full titles of all editions are not given, since they can be found in the bibliographies cited (the fullest and most professional one remains “Les imprimeurs…” by Kawecka-Gryczowa). Most information is included in the following four works: Christophorus Sandius, Bibliotheca anti-trinitariorum, sive Catalogus scriptorum, et succincta narratio de vita eorum auctorum… Freistadii [= Amsterdam]: J. Aconium [= Henricus Wetstein], 1684 Alodia Kawecka-Gryczowa, Les imprimeurs des antitrinitaires polonais Rodecki et Sternacki / Arian´skie oficyny wydawnicze Rodeckiego i Sternackiego. GenHve: Droz, 1974 Philip Knijjff & Sibbe Jan Viser, Bibliographia Sociniana: A Bibliographical Reference Tool for the Study of Dutch Socinianism and Antitrinitarianism. Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2004 Martin Schmeisser, Sozinianische Bekenntnisschriften: der Rakjwer Katechismus des Valentin Schmalz (1608) und der sogenannte Soner-Katechismus. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012 Editions of the Racovian Catechism in chronological order (not included in the Bibliography at the end of this volume): Jerzy Schoman’s Catechism (this is not a Racovian Catechism accepted and used by the church but a catechism written by the author for his children)

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1574 Catechesis et confession fidei… Typis Alexandri Turobini. Anno nati Iesu Christi, filii dei. Krakjw : Rodecki, 1574 Catechesis Racoviensis (maior) – the first version 1605 – the original Polish version Authors: Hieronim Moskorzowski (Hieronymus Moscorovius), Valentin Schmalz/Schmaltz (Valentinus Smalcius, Walenty Szmalc); Johannes Völkel (Volkelius), Pierre Statorius jr. Katechizm Zboru tych ludzi, ktjrzy w Krjlestwie Polskim i w Wielkim Ksie˛stwie Litewskim… wyznawaja˛… Rakjw : Sternacki, 1605 1608 – German translation by Valentinus Smalcius Catechimus, Der Gemeine derer Leute die da im Königreich Poln vnd im Grosfürstenthumb Littawen…. Zu Rackaw Im Iahre nach Christi geburt 1608 (critical edition in Martin Schmeisser, Sozinianische Bekenntnisschriften…, 2012) 1609 (or 1608) – Latin translation by Hieronim Moskorzowski Catechesis Ecclesiarum quae in regno Poloniae et Magno Ducatu Lithuaniae… affirmant…. Dutch and English translations are based on this version 1612 – German translation (faithful reprint of the 1608 edition) Catechimus, Der Gemeine derer Leute die da im Königreich Poln vnd im Grosfürstenthumb Littawen…. Zu Rackaw Im Iahre nach Christi geburt 1612 1614 Catechesis Ecclesiarum, quae in Regno Poloniae et Magno Ducatu Lithuaniae … affirmant … “Racoviae 1609” [probably London, c. 1614] 1619 (faithful reprint of the 1605 edition) Katechizm Zboru tych ludzi, ktjrzy … wyznawaja˛… Rakjw : Sternacki, 1619 1623 Catechesis Ecclesiarum, quae in Regno Poloniae et Magno Ducatu Lithuaniae …

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affirmant … “Racoviae MDCIX” [false, London, Humphrey Lownes sen.?, c. 1623] 1651 a Catechesis Ecclesiarum, quae in Regno Poloniae et Magno Ducatu Lithuaniae … affirmant … Racoviae [false, London, William Dugard] 1609 [false, c. 1651] 1651 b Catechesis Ecclesiarum quae in regno Poloniae et Magno Ducatu Lithuaniae… affirmant… Version 1651 a with two appendices: [1.] [Przypkowski Samuel]: Fausti Socini Senensis Vita et Dissertatio Operibus suis ab Equite Polono praemissa. [2.] Cum Catalogo Operum eiusdem Fausti Socini. Racoviae [false, London, William Dugard] 1651 1652 – Dutch translation Alstedt, Johann Heinrich: ‘t Rackouws catechismvs met sijn onder-soeck, In ‘t Latijn beschreven, van den hoogh-geleerden man, Joan-Henrico Alstedio… Franeker : Idzard Balck 1652 1652 – English translation by John Biddle The Racovian catechisme; vvherein you have the substance of the confession of those churches, which in the kingdom of Poland, and great dukedome of Lithuania … do affirm… [Transl. by John Biddle]. Amsterdam: Janz Brooer [false, London: Richard Moone] 1652 1659 – Dutch translation (by Collegiants / Collegiantes) De Rakousche-Catechismus, Uyt het Hoogh-duytsch in het Nederduytsch vertaelt, Door I.C. [Ioannes Cornelius vulgo Knoll]. t’Rakouw [falso! – ], Voor den Autheur, in’t Iaer ons Heeren 1659 (chapters on baptism and Holy Supper were not included; for that reason the edition was not accepted by the antitrinitarians) 1659 – Dutch translation by Jan Cornelisz Knoll De Rakousche-Catechismus, Uyt het Hoogh-duytsch in het Nederduytsch vertaelt, Door I.C. [Ioannes Cornelius vulgo Knoll]. t’Rakouw [false], Voor den Autheur, in’t Iaer ons Heeren 1659 Catechesis Racoviensis (maior) – the revised, enlarged and updated Latin version

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1665 (Eds. Florianus Crusius, Joachim Stegmann Jr, Andreas Wissowatius), Catechesis Ecclesiarum Polonicarum, Unum Deum Patrem illiusque Filium Unigenitum, una cum Spiritu S. ex sacra Scriptura consistentium. Anno 1609, in lucem primum emissa, & post per viros aliquot in eodem Regno correcta. Iterumque interpositis compluribus annis a I. Crellio Franco, ac nunc tandem a Jona Schlichtingio a Bucowiec recognita ac dimidia parte aucta. Irenopoli: post annum 1659 [=1665?] Includes: Martinus Ruarus, Jonas Schlichtingius, In catechismum notae, cum responsionibus quibusdam Jonae Schlichtingii 1666 – Dutch translation of the 1665 version (Eds. Johannes Crellius, Martinus Ruarus, Jonas Schlichtingius), Catechismus of korte onderwijzing in de christelijke religie… Vrijburg: Hieronymus Veedemond, 1666 1667 – Dutch translation (reprint of the 1666 translation) Catechismus of korte onderwijzing in de christelijke religie… Vrijburg: Hieronymus Veedemond, 1667 1680 (reprint of the 1665 edition with additional notes and rearrangements of the text made by Benedictus Wissowatius) (Eds. Johannes Crellius, Martinus Ruarus, Jonas Schlichtingius, Andreas Wissowatius) Catechesis Ecclesiarum Polonicarum. […] Stauropoli: Per Eulogerum Philalethen, 1680 1684 (reprint of the 1665 edition with additional notes and rearrangements of the text made by Benedictus Wissowatius) (Eds. Johannes Crellius, Martinus Ruarus, Jonas Schlichtingius, Andreas Wissowatius, Benedictus Wissowatius Jr.). Catechesis Ecclesiarum Polonicarum. […] Stauropoli: Per Eulogerum Philalethen, 1684 1739 (faithful reprint of the 1609 edition, supplemented by information about the 1680 edition; published for polemical purposes) Catechesis Racoviensis seu Liber Socinianorum primarius. [Edited by] Georg Ludwig Oeder. Frankorurti et Lipsiae apud Joannem Adamum Schmidt, 1739 1818 – English translation of the 1680 version The Racovian Catechism, with notes and illustrations, translated from the Latin:

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To which is prefixed a sketch of the history of unitarianism in Poland and the adjacent countries. By Thomas Rees. London 1818 Catechesis Racoviensis (minor) 1605? Catechesis minor (pro parvulis) Polonice. 1605 Der kleine katechismus zur übung der Kinder… Zu Rakaw bey Sebastian Sternatzki. 1605 1612 Catechesis minor iuventuti Religione Christiana imbuendae conscripta. Racoviae, Anno a Christo nato 1612 1629 Kurtzer Inhalt der christlichen Religion für die kinder und einfältigen gestellet. 1629 1633 Kurtzer Inhalt der Christlichen Religion. 1629 Kurtzer Inhalt der christlichen Religion, für die kinder und einfeltigen gestellet. 1633

2.6.4 The State of Research and Proposals for the Future One can see on the above list there is only one critical edition of the Racovian Catechism – of the German translation of the first Polish edition. There is therefore an urgent need to prepare critical editions of both versions of the Catechism and their translations in other languages. In Martin Schmeisser’s edition a reader may find a comprehensive introduction to the Racovian Catechism, mostly in the context of its reception in the German lands. Although Schmeisser’s work remains the best and most up-to-date description of the Catechism, the chapter on the subject in Earl Morse Wilbur’s book A History of Unitarianism, Socinianism and its Antecendents (1946) still remains today a valuable comprehensive survey of the history, contents, theology and significance of the Racovian Catechism. Wilbur aptly observed that

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From the contents it is evident that in spite of its title and form it is not a catechism in the sense of being a book for the religious instruction of the young, so much as a manual of doctrines in question-and-answer form, intended largely for purposes of propaganda and defence (Wilbur : 1946).

There are many examples of the foreign reception of the Catechism, starting from the German and Latin refutations by Friedrich Balduin, who wrote them “in the name of the theological faculty at Wittenberg” (Wilbur : 1946), and the reaction of James I of England, to whom the first Latin version was dedicated, and the English Parliament. As Wilbur observed: Thus well launched into public notice both on the Continent and in England, the Racovian Catechism remained for a century and a half a thorn in the side of both Lutheran and Reformed theologians, and a standing object of attack by them in learned works, and by theological students in their dissertations and essays (Wilbur : 1946).

The Racovian Catechism was an attempt to define antitrinitarian doctrine at the stage which could be called Socinian, if we assume that in the evolution of the doctrine there were three main phases: 1. “pre-Socinian”, in the late 1550s and in 1560s, prior to the arrival of Socinus in Poland; 2. “Socinian”, during the stay of Socinus in Poland (from 1579 until his death in 1604), when he had a great impact on the congregation, though he was not officially a member of it; and 3.”post-Socinian”, after his death, when three of the most influential representatives of the congregation were Johann Stegmann the Elder, Samuel Przypkowski and Andrzej Wiszowaty. The Racovian Catechism, a work of Hieronim Moskorzowski, Valentin Schmalz, Johannes Völkel and Pierre Statorius jr., in its first, Polish language edition published in 1605, was a summary of this Socinian phase of the doctrine, very much influenced by Socinus. It was not an accident that it was published one year after his premature death. Wilbur suggested that Christianae religionis brevissima Institutio was “at least Socinus’s first draft of the proposed work”. Comparative analysis of this work of Socinus (cf. Socinus: 1618a) and the first edition of the Racovian Catechism would be necessary as a part of a critical edition of the Catechism; such an analysis has not been undertaken so far. A detailed analysis of the Racovian Catechism should present its place in the evolution of the doctrine of the Polish antitrinitarian church. Especially interesting in this evolution would be doctrinal differences between old Reformed ministers, i. e. Jan Niemojewski and Marcin Czechowic, and new theologians who did not come from the Reformed church, i. e. Faustus Socinus and Pierre Statorius, because the Catechism was written by members of this second group. It would be important to decide to what extent the Racovian Catechism reflects differences between early antitrinitarian thought and much later ideas of “postSocinian theology”: there were, for example, internal debates on Christology and

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the idea of the Holy Trinity – e. g. about the moment when Jesus Christ became God, the preexistence of Christ, and salvation. It would be equally interesting to determine the place of the Catechism in the evolution of opinions on the relationships between faith and reason and Revelation and reason (cf. Ogonowski: 1991). Another interesting issue is the evolution of views from the pre-Socinian antirationalism, through the Socinian view that human reason is not able to work independently without Revelation, to the post-Socinian rationalism and approval of the concept of religio naturalis. In opposition to the Reformed church, whose theological rules were in principle decided in the Heidelberg Catechism and the canons of the Synod of Dort, the doctrine of the Polish Brethren – if it can be called a doctrine at all – was formulated in an atmosphere of ongoing debates and was subject to significant development and change. Moreover, we should be aware that this doctrine, or rather collection of theological views, discussed in English language textbooks as “unitarian”, was not unitarian from the very beginning and went through both tritheistic and ditheistic phases, although the Racovian Catechism represents the final, unitarian stage of development of this theology, which has inspired successive generations of unitarians, especially in England and America, to the present day. The role of the Racovian Catechism in these developments is essential and the extent of its influence is clearly demonstrated by the existence of two English translations: of the first edition (The Racovian Catechisme, translated by John Biddle in 1652) and of the 1680 edition (The Racovian Catechism, translated by Thomas Rees, 1818). In this context it is surprising that there is no critical, annotated edition of the original (Polish and Latin) versions of this work, fundamental for understanding the history of early modern religious thought in Europe. The only moderately comprehensive study on its theology, 30 pages long, was published in German more than half a century ago (cf. Wrzecionko: 1963). There is no critical, annotated edition of the first edition in Polish of 1605. Schmeisser’s edition refers to the German version of the same text but in different contexts and it has no annotations or extended footnotes referring to the theology of the work. It cannot replace an edition (ideally, a parallel edition) of the Polish and Latin originals of the first version. The reasons for undertaking serious research on this work are obvious: this is the only work of Polish non-fiction literature which had such an impact on world thought. Immediately translated into Latin and German and later into Dutch and English it played – together with other Socinian books – a fundamental role in intellectual debates in Europe. As a catechism (although not a typical catechism), and not a complicated theological treatise, it became especially dangerous as a source of radical, heretical thought. The well-known incidents in England – first with the dedication of the first Latin edition to James I, King of England and

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second with distribution of the English translation in 1652 – were important, symbolic acts in the development of English unitarianism. The involvement of John Milton in its publication, and of Oliver Cromwell in the special parliamentary committee summoned to counteract its propagation, show the significance of the whole Racovian Catechism affair in seventeenth-century England. These issues, including the contexts of the Votes of Parliament touching the book commonly called the Racovian Catechism of 1652, have been extensively discussed by Reformation scholars, especially Stanisław Kot in his article on the influence of the Polish Brethren in England (cf. Kot: 1935–1936). The second edition of the Racovian Catechism, revised and extended, was published in Latin, with no Polish equivalent (and no Polish translation to this day), and is an example of a post-Socinian phase in the evolution of antitrinitarian theology – a phase following the expulsion of the Polish Brethren from Poland-Lithuania. In the above bibliography, German, Dutch and English versions of this translation are listed. There have been no comparative studies on the first and second version of the Catechism, or on the widespread reception of all these versions. This is a task for a multinational research group, to be published as a multivolume critical edition of all versions in the context of antitrinitarian/Socinian/unitarian theology between the 1560s and 1660s and later, at least until the mid-18th century when Georg Ludwig Oeder published his monumental work Catechesis Racoviensis, seu, Liber Socinianorum primarius. Catechesis Racoviensis, for many years underestimated by scholars, is undoubtedly Liber Socinianorum primarius – especially because it was a catechism, i. e. a primer of this confession. A thorough study of this primer is necessary for understanding the whole complexity of Socinian thought.

2.7

Debates between Jesuits and “Heretics” in Early Modern Polish Literature

2.7.1 Polemical Pamphlets of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation It will be impossible to present in this short essay a general survey of Polish religious polemics in the 16th and 17th centuries, and to discuss their historical and ideological background, definitions and contexts. For this reason my introductory remarks will refer to only one sphere of polemical writings, mainly polemics between Jesuits and Socinians in Poland at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries. Over the centuries, misjudgments based on one-sided interpretations of

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historical events have very often resulted in arguments which have disabled constructive dialogue in society. What is necessary in the effort to achieve mutual understanding is knowledge of the past, and often that means investigating the roots of misunderstandings which began as early as the beginning of the 16th century. Protestant prejudices against Roman Catholics and biased opinions about Protestants in the Roman Catholic Church are often associated with stereotypes based on historical events which were often misinterpreted and sometimes even falsified. Historians of culture bear the responsibility for studying the historical facts, uncovering new and unreported data, and offering new and fair interpretations of documents. A predominantly historical study can serve as a contribution to a more ecumenical view of the situation in contemporary Poland. Zeroing in on a case in Poland-Lithuania provides a unique microcosm that is valuable not only to historians of literature and culture. The situation of the Church in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th and 17th centuries is good material for a case study concerning the problems of ecumenism and toleration in historical perspective. The Commonwealth was a kingdom with one sovereign, parliament and army. It comprised the larger parts of present-day Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus and Ukraine. It thus was the largest country in Europe at that time, excluding Muscovy. The Commonwealth was a multinational and multicultural country comprising less than 40 percent Roman Catholics, the remainder being divided between the Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, Lutheran, Calvinist and even Muslim minorities. The state policy of religious peace did not allow one to take a heretic to court or expel him from the country. In such a situation, there was an urgent demand for a serious exchange of opinions between the radical Socinians on the one hand and the Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists on the other (cf. Jobert: 1974; Kłoczowski: 1988b; Tazbir : 1967, 1996). Thousand of polemical pamphlets were printed in Europe during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation eras but there has never been an extensive interest in the cultural and historical significance of religious polemics and in their artistic/rhetorical values. The first scholars to appreciate the cultural importance of polemics (and not only the theological issues discussed in them) were historians of art who took into consideration not only illustrations in polemics but also their significance for what might be called history of mentality. Fritz Saxl, a distinguished art historian associated with the Warburg Institute in London, was one of the few scholars who as early as the 1940s recognised the decisive significance of pamphlet research for Reformation studies. In his lecture on Illustrated Pamphlets of the Reformation, delivered in 1948, he said: I think it is no exaggeration to say that more was written and read in the span of a few years during the Reformation than ever before: not only books – even though the

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edition of Luther’s works has seventy-one fat volumes, Melanchthon’s Opera comprise twenty-eight volumes, and Erasmus’s writings fill nine folio volumes of about a thousand pages each. The books are only a fraction compared with the pamphlets which were produced. Of Luther’s manifestos of the one year 1523 no fewer than a hundred and eighty-nine are still extant. Any study of the Reformation, therefore, consists largely in the study of its pamphlet literature. Every event was heralded and accompanied by a flood of printed broadsheets and pamphlets and these were often illustrated by woodcuts. Both word and image were used by Catholics as well as Protestants, for attack as well as defense (Saxl: 1957).

My essay will not deal with the illustrations in pamphlets. Saxl’s remarks have, however, a significance reaching far beyond the early German Reformation prints about which he made the following remark: From popular and sometimes very unrefined sources like sermons and their literary counterparts, from broad-sheets and pamphlets, we learn much about the state of mind of the German nation, its fears and hopes, which eventually produced Protestantism in the North and rejuvenated the Church of Rome (Saxl: 1957; cf. Ozment: 1982; Cole: 1975).

And in another lecture about Dürer and the Reformation we read: The woodcuts and the broadsheets and pamphlets of the fifteenth century and of the Reformation are not great works of art but they are interesting to study as a true mirror of the temper of the period. The texts which accompany them serve as additional evidence, and word and image together evoke a lively picture of Luther, of the vigor of his religious and political ideas, his charity towards those whom he considered the oppressors, the Pope and the Church of Rome, Antichrist and the Antichristians (Saxl: 1957, 267).

There were also some significant polemical pamphlets of the early Reformation in Poland published before 1560, scrupulously described by Maria Czapska in her extensive article entitled Religious polemic of the first period of Reformation in Poland [until 1548], but one can hardly see in these polemics any significant difference from what was discussed in Reformation pamphlets of that time in Western Europe, and it will suffice to note the chapter headings of this article to examine roughly the state of affairs: Basic assumptions of the reformers, Church hierarchy and power, Primacy of the Pope, Religious orders, Celibacy of the clergy, Cult of saints, Pictures and relics, Mass and the Eucharist, Other sacraments and ceremonies, Purgatory and indulgences (see Czapska: 1928). The few studies devoted to Central European polemics published to date prove, however, that the situation in Poland and also in Transylvania was unique because of the above-mentioned situation of toleration: only there did Roman Catholics and representatives of the Reformation (including the Radical Reformation) initiate so many public disputes and publish such a large number of

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pamphlets (cf. Tazbir : 1986, 161–176; Frick: 1989; Bal#zs: 1996; Misiurek: 1983, 1984; Radon´ : 1993; Stec: 1988; Tazbir : 1959, 68–80; Tazbir : 1987, 95–116). Between 1560 and 1660 several hundred adversarial Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Socinian pamphlets were published in Poland. The social, political and religious situation there was exceptionally favourable for such activities. In addition, it remained a significant challenge for Roman Catholic theologians who were involved in the dialogue (not repression) since it often had to be a dialogue in public and in the vernacular. Such an ongoing dialogue with Protestants in a Catholic country is interesting both from a historical and contemporary point of view. A historian of culture might analyse this unprecedented dialogue and study how the situation of toleration, promoted officially by the state and opposed by most Roman Catholic bishops, fostered polemical exchanges of views between “Catholics” and “heretics”. Stereotypes and prejudices caused by these confrontations still influence historians of culture. I have analysed several pamphlets written at the turn of the 16th century and will try to demonstrate how stereotypes and prejudices against “heretics” were created in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Both in Poland and in other European countries two levels of printed polemic were present: first, learned, theoretical tracts, and second, popular pamphlets, satires, lampoons and sermons. In this essay I will take into account only the polemical pamphlet. I define a pamphlet according to Hans Joachim Köhler’s definition as an “independent, non-recurring, unbound publication (…) whose purpose is to agitate (that is, move to action) and/or to propagandise (that is, influence opinion) and which is addressed to the masses or the public-at-large” (cf. Ozment: 1982). Polemic itself would be here – as Miriam Usher Chrisman defined it – “a text presenting an argument or defence or controversial in nature”; controversy is understood here according to conceptions of that period – i. e. as controversial theology (cf. Chrisman: 1982).

2.7.2 Socinians as Principal Adversaries in Catholic Polemics In the 1560s, the whole Christian community in Poland was challenged by the crisis in the Polish Calvinist church after the death in 1560 of Jan Łaski, a figure significant for both the Polish and English Reformations. Deprived of the powerful and dedicated leadership of Łaski, the Polish Reformed Church soon produced an offshoot, the so-called Minor Church, where dissident ministers practised their antitrinitarian and Anabaptist beliefs. John Calvin himself became very concerned about the situation, as evidenced by his letters to the leaders of the Polish Reformed Church. Supported by the Italian Protestants, such as Giorgio Biandrata and later, from the 1570s, Fausto Sozzini, a group of

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Polish Reformed pastors formed the most radical and theologically sophisticated heresy of the Reformation period (cf. Wiles: 1996; Pelikan: 1991, 322–331; Williams: 1978; Williams: 1992; Kot: 1956, 1957; for more on Socinianism see chapters 2.3 and 2.4). The debate between the Socinians and their adversaries was conducted by theologians and preachers skilled in theoretical and scholarly theology, and also in popular polemic and preaching. The debate in Poland acquired a unique character and vigour by comparison to the religious polemics in other European countries at the time. When I studied the primary and secondary sources dealing with the European polemics of the period of the Reformation and CounterReformation, I realised that, at that time and also earlier, there were no pamphleteering activities in Europe which can be compared to the exchange of opinions that took place in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between the 1560s and the 1660s. It was only there that an adversary appeared who demanded a discussion of various fundamental theological questions, and it was only there that such a discussion was possible to sustain over a long period of time without resorting to violence. Apparently the social, political and religious situation in Poland was exceptionally favourable for such activities. They constituted a real challenge for the Catholic theologians who were involved in a dialogue which often became public and which was held in the vernacular. Thus contrary to an erroneous view often encountered in popular writings on the Reformation, it was not always the Roman Catholics who opposed the Calvinists and the Lutherans, or vice versa. There appeared during the Reformation other groups which were more radical than the “mainline” Protestants, and in such a situation, Lutherans and Calvinists were closer to the Catholics than to those radical reformers. Socinians, or Polish Arians, were one such group. It happened quite often that public debates with the Socinians, held mostly in Roman Catholic churches, were later summarised by the disputants or their followers. Such accounts of public debates comprise a special section of polemical literature of that time. A collection of such pamphlets was published in 1592. Two public disputes held in January and May between a Jesuit and a Socinian, both about the divine preexistence of Jesus Christ, were later chronicled by writers from the opposition groups (cf. Calissius: 1592; Łaszcz: 1592a; Łaszcz: 1592b; Statorius: 1592). We have also official protocols of these debates. In fact, the most significant polemics were held between the Jesuits and the Socinians. At that time, the Jesuits were the most efficient Catholic order so far as organisation, learning and debates were concerned. Examples of Jesuit skill include the teachings about religious controversies in the Collegium Romanum and the works of Roberto Bellarmino (cf. Richgels: 1980). The most interesting Polish polemics took place between 1580 and 1625: polemics about the output of Jakub Wujek (his translations of Bellarmino and of the Bible),

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tracts by Marcin S´miglecki, Marcin Łaszcz’s polemics with non-Catholics (mainly Socinians and Lutherans), and a series of polemics with the Socinians by the famous Jesuit orator Piotr Skarga.

2.7.3 Jesuit Anti-Socinian and Anti-Lutheran Polemics – the Case of Marcin Łaszcz I will discuss in some detail two very different examples of polemical antiSocinian and anti-Lutheran pamphlets written by two Jesuits, Marcin Łaszcz (Martinus Lascius) and Piotr Skarga. Łaszcz was born in 1551 and entered the Jesuit Order in 1571. He studied philosophy at the University of Vilnius (then Wilno) in 1571–74, and then he himself taught grammar and rhetoric at that university. He was also a preacher, a schoolmaster and an administrator in many Jesuit centres. He died in Cracow in 1615. Łaszcz published about 15 pamphlets in Polish and some theatrical plays in Latin; the plays were staged in Jesuit colleges. A modern Jesuit historian once wrote that Marcin Łaszcz “oversimplified the Counter-Reformation polemic, stimulated intolerance and used demagogy in religious disputes” (Naton´ski: 1973). This view, that he was an enfant terrible of Polish Catholic polemical writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has gained some currency, but it is, in my opinion, unjustified. Łaszcz’s rhetoric may appear unacceptable to the modern ear, but his learning was genuine and profound. The work most often quoted in support of such negative opinions is Prescription for a Plaster of Czechowic, or the Anabaptist Minister, published under the pen name Szcze˛sny Z˙ebrowski (Łaszcz: 1597). The Prescription was written as part of an ongoing debate concerning the first modern Catholic translation of the Bible into Polish, by the Jesuit Jakub Wujek. Wujek openly acknowledged the achievements of the most recent Polish translations, including the controversial Socinian translations by Szymon Budny and Marcin Czechowic (cf. marginal notes in Wujek: 1593), and made use of these translations in his own work, while openly criticising errors and misinterpretations of his doctrinal opponents. All this may be seen from the notes placed in the margins and after each chapter, in sections called Teachings and warnings. In reply to Łaszcz’s criticism, Marcin Czechowic published his Plaster for a publication of the New Testament by Father Jakub Wujek (Czechowic: 1594). The work began with a polemic against Wujek concerning specific translation problems from the point of view of biblical scholarship, made a detailed, critical analysis of the Jesuit’s translation, and then debated Wujek’s Teachings and warnings. He accused Wujek of stealing words, phrases and even longer passages from his translation without crediting the source. Łaszcz’s Prescription for a

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Plaster of Czechowic is, in turn, a reply to this work by Czechowic. Łaszcz wrote his work “on behalf” of Wujek, who for unknown reasons preferred not to respond (see Szczucki: 1964, 187–194). In his pamphlet, Łaszcz deals with the problems raised by Czechowic, but in his generalisations and opinions he goes far beyond a mere response. Such chapters as “Reasons for Anabaptist deceptions”, “Anabaptist jokes about the Pope”, and “On Anabaptist immersion” abound in insulting and abusive language. In the writings of his adversaries, this pamphlet eventually became the leading example of a Catholic polemic full of hatred and derision. We should remember, however, that in this period all authors made use of the early Christian genre called the invective, which was a treatise elaborating a certain theme and filled with insults against persons who propagated different religious opinions (cf. Radon´ : 1993, 91–118). As a genre, the invective went out of use, but as a method of dealing with an adversary, it has been thriving to this day in various contexts. It should also be kept in mind that pamphlets written “in a spirit of genuine humility and love” by Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists or Socinians expressed brotherly love not in a way that we consider appropriate in our own time. A twentieth-century approach to the style of Reformation polemics risks taking them out of the context and customs within which they functioned. They should be kept in the context of the works of FranÅois Rabelais, the brothers Bruegel, or Hieronymus Bosch, rather than compared to the polemical style appropriate for the post-Enlightenment world. When a polemicist describes a Socinian doctrine as “an old and rotting cabbage” and the Socinians themselves as “Arian bats and owls” or “a stench of infernal perfumes”, such statements (by H. Powodowski and M. Łaszcz respectively) should not cause righteous indignation but rather provoke reflection on the imagination of those writers and the expectations of their readers. Unlike many other polemicists, Łaszcz tries to be persuasive by conjuring up certain images which enable the reader to visualise the monstrosity of the heresy. In order to persuade more effectively, he combines an appeal to the visual and olfactory stimuli. An invective thus becomes self-dependent and becomes an image. We should remember that our polemicist often and willingly took part in missionary visits to small towns and villages. During such missions, Jesuit preachers instructed peasants in the basic truths of faith and in Christian duties. It is probable that such a “physiological” and down-to-earth imagination was to some extent a result of Łaszcz’s experiences as a village preacher. What images did he present to a devout reader? First of all, he offers the portraits of his adversary, Marcin Czechowic. He is called a “stinking and rotten corpse” who “has rotted and become stinking in this Anabaptist stench” to such an extent that “his mouth and hair exude stinking sins and odours” (Łaszcz: 1597, my translation). According to Łaszcz, Czechowic and other Socinians like

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to smell “human odours and squalours” and to “chew” other people’s sins. Czechowic is also presented as a “stinking beggar” with “a mouldy beard”, “a stinking corpse” and “a rotten brain” who washed his “mug” with “dung in latrines” that are full of other people’s sins. Another frequently encountered image is a Socinian as a “non-whitened Negro”. A Negro here is a combination of man and devil, while “non-whitened” refers to the ineffectiveness of Socinian baptism, which involved complete submersion in water. “You will try to whiten a non-whitened Negro in vain”, writes the polemicist, and then adds: “I do not want to whiten you, infernal Negro”. There is also a shocking picture of a Socinian baptism presented as an immersion of swine in a puddle by swineherds and compared to the biblical picture of swine “immersed in the sea by the devils” (a reference to Matt 8:30– 32). The polemicist presents to the reader visions of evil behaviour and debauchery on the part of the Moravian Anabaptists, “among whom omnia sunt communia [everything is communal] and wives are shared” and “children do not recognise their parents and parents do not recognise children” because “they are mixed together as if they were cattle”. This second “vision”, meant to appeal to the reader’s imagination, refers to an event that allegedly took place in Germany. There the Anabaptists were supposed to gather on a mountain just before their planned departure from earth to heaven. While waiting for the event to happen, “they were beguiled by the devil and shamelessly copulated with each other”. The most bizarre image, however, is that of “Czechowic’s wife with four heads”, “a monstrosity more monstrous than the sea monsters”. Czechowic claimed that the Church is the body of Christ and has only one head (Jesus Christ), while the other heads (such as the Pope) are not necessary because “one body with two heads, inconsistent with each other like water and fire, cannot survive”. In his reply to this argument, Marcin Łaszcz creates an image of a wife with four heads to demonstrate that Czechowic had confused apples and oranges, as it were, in his inability to understand that the earthly head of the Church (the Pope) belongs to a different semantic order from its heavenly “head” (Jesus Christ). Łaszcz tries to prove that Czechowic’s wife “has at least four heads: the first is you, the second is her head, the third is Jesus Christ and the fourth is God the Father”. Then Łaszcz further indulges his imagination: “And, what’s worse, when you die before she does, she’ll have new lovers and will marry a second and third husband and then she will be the most indecent monster, a chimera with a dozen heads: really an unusual wife. But you are at least equally monstrous: you have one head but several lecherous bodies: first of all, your lustful corpse, your first, second or even third wife, as they say, so there is one head but four bodies and you are a monstrosity more monstrous than other lustful monsters”. This presumably is intended to show

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that Czechowic’s argument about the several heads of the Church had missed the point. Thus the polemic is not dispassionate, but rather uses fantastic images supposed to rouse in the reader a feeling of aversion to the Socinian theologian and also to other Socinians, their beliefs and their family life. The methods of persuasion that are particularly noteworthy in this text include a concentration on the functions of the human body, its smells and physical needs, as well as references to rural life. Thus we have swine in a puddle (not in a biblical sea!), dung and latrines, stinking beggars with mouldy beards and heads, and folksy images of hell. Such methods and images were supposed to demonstrate the evil of the adversary and prove that he is beneath contempt. In this respect, Łaszcz’s work is quite extraordinary. Such an accumulation of invectives and physical images meant to rouse a feeling of aversion was unusual even in the Polish Jesuit polemic of the period. Other polemicists used gentler language and more intellectual means of persuasion. Historian Sławomir Radon´ wrote that the sixteenth-century theologian-polemicists were endowed with an “imagination steered towards the polemic” (Radon´ : 1993). Indeed, the creation of images which had no equivalent in the real experience of the writer was an important part of Renaissance or Baroque polemic. While in these pamphlets the abstract language of theology and philosophy was dominant, and the linguistic analysis of Bible passages was more important than imaginative and artistic writing, the polemicists also followed Quintilianus, who encouraged orators to use experiences called visions, “whereby things absent are presented to our imagination with such extreme vividness that they seem actually to be before our very eyes…. From such impressions arises… actuality”, which makes the orator seem to “exhibit the actual event” (Lausberg: 1990, 399–407). Several methods of producing a feeling of disgust in devout readers were used by Łaszcz in his anti-Lutheran polemic about Martin Luther as the Devil’s disciple (cf. Tazbir : 1987, 117–138). He published three times a polemical tract in Polish which in Alegambe’s Jesuit bibliography has the Latin title Lutheri Disputatio cum Daemone (cf. Alegambe: 1676). In the first edition of 1605 there is an undivided text in which Łaszcz accurately quotes parts of the devil’s statements from Luther’s work De Angulari Missa, i. e. Von der Winkelmesse (On Private Masses) and then makes comments about these statements from the point of view of Catholic doctrine. He accuses Luther of passivity and silence in the face of the devil’s attacks on private masses. In this edition the structure of Łaszcz’s pamphlet is reminiscent of the shape of the work with which it polemicises: Luther also quotes the devil’s statements and then makes comments about them and it is true that for the most part he does not attack them; in this respect the Jesuit is right, and I will discuss later the reasons for Luther’s passivity.

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Two other editions of Łaszcz’s description of this dispute between Luther and the devil have a different structure – the text is arranged as a dialogue and divided into parts beginning with passages marked by a larger font: “Luther the Disciple” and “The Devil as Master”. Such delimitation of the text is an important indicator and is supposed to suggest that we have here a real dialogue between two parties – a disciple and an instructor. Yet under the heading “The Devil as Master” there are indeed fragments of the devil’s statements from Luther’s work, but the fragments printed under the heading “Luther the Disciple” are mostly not Luther’s remarks, but comments written by Łaszcz himself. Łaszcz repeatedly points out that Luther remains silent because he agrees with the devil, and then announces what arguments a Catholic should use in reply. Such a structure – Luther’s text written as a dialogue – was probably used in order to increase the tract’s power of persuasion, according to the everlasting rules of rhetoric still used today in journalism and promotional materials: the reader’s attention is attracted by things which are intensive (e. g. bold fonts) and repeated, dialogues should be visibly separated from the text, and texts should be divided into chapters. In the new edition of Łaszcz’s work the visual and graphic arrangement suggested that Luther had produced a report of his conversation with the devil. Even the title suggests that the description of relations between Luther and the devil comes from Luther himself: “Disputation in which the Devil the master teaches Luther his disciple what he should believe. Written by Luther himself. Tomo 7. De Angulari MISSA. Wittemberg Anno 1554 impressa (…). And translated into Latin by the most faithful of Luther’s disciples, D. Ionas”. The Latin title of Luther’s work Von der Winkelmesse und Pfaffenweihe, from the translation by Justus Jonas, is quoted here; another Latin version of the title is De Missa privata (Benzing: 1966, 361–362). As James Atkinson wrote, In it he [i. e. Luther] shows that the idea of a private mass and the idea of the sacrifice of Christ’s body are an utter perversion. He contrasts the mass priest with his sacrifice on the one hand, and the great evangelical doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, with its preacher called to the Word of God, on the other (Atkinson: 1968).

One should admit that although Luther’s opinions are attacked in the pamphlet, Łaszcz reports them with great accuracy. I will present them briefly. The devil blames Luther for saying private masses for fifteen years and claims it was idolatry ; Luther responds that he was obeying the orders of his superiors. The devil says in reply that Turks and pagans are also obedient and that Father Martin’s ordination and services were false. Luther, cornered by the devil, decides to listen to arguments against his priesthood and ordination. The devil attacks the Virgin Mary and the saints as intermediaries and the mass as a pagan offering. He claims that Luther said masses against the will of Jesus Christ

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because it should be celebrated for the people, for the community (“communio” in Latin), and that during the mass he did not confess Christ to the congregation but whispered to himself. He treated it as an offering and not a supper, and did not give communion to the people for confirmation of their faith but treated masses as private deeds performed to earn money. His ordination is false, performed against Christ’s will. He is Christ’s enemy since he says masses for himself and not for the people. Then there is a comparison to the sacrament of baptism, which also cannot be celebrated individually, and arguments against sinful priests dispensing sacraments (cf. Łaszcz: 1605, 1609). All these remarks of the devil, summarised above, were faithfully taken from Luther’s work and put under the headings “The Devil as Master” (cf. Luther : 1912b). Łaszcz also quotes Luther’s own words under the headings “Luther the Disciple”. He does not quote, however, all his remarks but only those in which Luther confirms that he really talked with the devil or tries to justify his previous inappropriate attitude towards Christ. Łaszcz does not quote passages in which Martin Luther explains the nature of the devil’s deceitful cunning and enables the reader to understand why the devil’s statements are consistent with his understanding of the Christian doctrine. Łaszcz’s manipulation lets him confront the devil’s teachings with the Catholic doctrine in consecutive fragments of his text and at the end he can easily prove that Luther’s teachings come from the devil, since the reader is unable to read all of Luther’s opinions. Łaszcz says that “for Luther, what the devil says is true, not the Gospel”, and that “Luther is convinced and joins the devil”. Furthermore, Łaszcz constructs his statements to give the impression that they come from Luther’s text: Luther speaks to Satan in such a way as if he were saying: (…) I admit that my previous faith was false, idolatrous, and anti-Christian and I join the faith you recommend. I only want to ask you as my Master one more question: what should I think about the Church? (Łaszcz: 1605).

Luther did not of course write or say any of these words but they were put under the heading “Luther the Disciple”; authentic passages from Luther’s work had previously been put under the same heading, thus giving the impression that these new words were also true. Formally, everything is alright: the words “as if he were saying” protect Łaszcz against accusations of falsification, but of course not everybody would notice them when he reads a false quotation. At the end we learn from Łaszcz’s pamphlet about the most important issue: all the devil’s activities were undertaken in order to persuade Luther to join the devil’s church: the devil “instructs Luther in how to go to a concealed and invisible church, unknown to Luther until the devil told him about this second church (…). He was successful in encouraging Luther to join that church”. The conclusion is clear : a Polish reader at the beginning of the 17th century had to conclude that the

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church established by Luther, i. e. the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession, was the devil’s church. I mentioned earlier that the devil’s opinions were actually taken from Luther’s book. Was the Jesuit polemicist right – at least partly? Luther’s Disputation with the Devil forces us to discuss Luther’s relations with the Devil as described in his works and revealed by his biographers. It is impossible to mention here all conversations between Luther and the devil, which may be found both in his work about private masses and primarily in his Tischreden, i. e. Table Talk (cf. Luther : 1912a, 1995). It is worth mentioning, however, that for more than 400 years the relations between Luther and the devil have been a problem not only to Christian theologians and apologists, but also to historians, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. In an introduction to the Weimar edition of Von der Winkelmesse the editors say that the devil’s words quoted by Luther are only figures of speech. Some authors of books on Luther – such as Franz Lau, James Atkinson and his Catholic biographer James Todd – are silent on this difficult point. Roland Bainton has a tendency to underestimate the problem. In his classic monograph he mentions in passing that Luther was under influence of a mediaeval, dualistic vision of the world and that, while Luther’s engagement in a fight with the devil may seem amusing, we should remember that the devil tells him about things which a man says to himself during introspection (cf. Bainton: 1950). Such an underestimation of the problem makes things even worse, especially when we remember Sigmund Freud’s opinion that the devil personifies restrained sexual impulses associated with anal eroticism, or works by Ernest Jones for whom belief in the devil was connected with restrained desires to imitate and oppose a father at the same time (cf. Di Nola: 1987). Psychoanalysis seemed to be a useful method by which to study Luther’s character, but it failed to explain essential problems. In 1937 Paul Reiter in his extensive, two volume work analysed Luther’s personality from the psychiatric point of view and diagnosed endogenous psychic depression. One should not be surprised that this book was strongly attacked by apologetic biographers of Luther (cf. Lau: 1963). However, all such ideas seem to be blind alleys and only polemicists like our Polish Jesuit would have been delighted if they had known the writings of Sigmund Freud or of some contemporary psychiatrists. The first scholar who discussed this problem openly, objectively and honestly was Heiko A. Oberman, who in his book Martin Luther: A Man Between God and the Devil proved that this problem is neither a late mediaeval curiosity, nor evidence of demonic possession, an Oedipus complex, a pact with the devil or a psychosis, but rather an important element of Luther’s faith (cf. Oberman: 1989). The visions experienced by Luther were real and it is not important how people nowadays try to explain them – they were part of his Christian belief,

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consistent with the Bible teachings and religious experience of the time. According to Oberman one cannot depreciate Luther’s belief in the devil and give priority to his belief in Christ. The devil and Jesus Christ are equally real to him and if one does not comprehend this state of Christian existence between God and the devil, one cannot understand Luther’s faith and experience. Oberman claims that idealising Luther as an enlightened thinker and at the same time disregarding his belief in the devil as a mediaeval relic is unacceptable. Oberman’s opinions draw our attention to some important aspects of 16thcentury religion. First, the real presence of the devil was for Luther the real presence of evil. Second, the devil, involved in his evil practices for thousands of years, was a learned and experienced being, proficient in philosophy and theology. The conflict between the Catholic polemicist and Luther occurred not because the Jesuit called into question the reality of the devil, his learning or the authenticity of the conversations between Luther and the devil. Our forefathers did not doubt that the devil tempted Saint Anthony the hermit and other eremites; moreover, they could not deny that the devil tempted Jesus Christ himself. The polemicist did not deny the reality of the devil; he was simply exasperated by the fact that Luther agreed with the devil who tempted him, and called into question not only private masses but Catholic masses and a hierarchical priesthood as a whole. Łaszcz was irritated that Luther did not reject the devil’s opinions but even tried to excuse his previous behaviour. As I have already mentioned, the devil’s opinions were taken from Luther’s work, but the polemicist omitted passages which prove that lack of protest did not mean signing a pact with the devil or joining the devil’s church. Luther himself predicted that such polemics would appear when he said that “the holy papists will sneer at me and say : you are a great Doctor and you cannot answer the devil? Don’t you know that he is a great liar?” Such accusations were made by Łaszcz. Luther also says ironically : “Thank you, dear gentlemen, for your concern because I wouldn’t know that the devil was a liar. If I was a papist and the devil would leave me alone as he leaves you, I would also know what to say to him”. In the key part of his defence Luther speaks about the treachery of the devil, who presents his lies as if they were true and could not be denied. “The devil – Luther continued – does not tell lies when he accuses us of immoral deeds and life. He has two witnesses (…): God’s commandments and our conscience” (cf. Luther : 1921, 204–205). As we can see, Luther’s dissatisfaction and remorse resulting from conduct that he considered false are expressed here as the devil’s statements; regardless of our attitude towards the reality of the devil the only important thing here is how Luther himself experienced this reality. As we know, both in his and his Catholic opponent’s opinion such statements came from the devil. Luther’s work on private masses was condemned also in some other Jesuit

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pamphlets in Poland at the turn of the 16th century (Tazbir : 1993, 54–55). Luther – “a man between God and the devil” – could easily as the author of a work on private masses become a victim of the Catholic polemicists, who had no reason to study the subtleties of his theology and preferred rather to convince their readers that he was another false philosopher who had signed a contract with the devil.

2.7.4 A Jesuit-Socinian Debate about the Authority of the Scripture Among the Jesuit polemicists, Piotr Skarga (1536–1612) is the most prominent. He received his education in Cracow and joined the Jesuit order in 1569, when he was already a priest and a famous preacher. He was the first rector of the Jesuit University in Wilno (today Vilnius in Lithuania). As an officially appointed preacher at the court of King Sigismund Vasa in the years 1588–1612, he became one of the king’s most influential advisors. His consistently anti-Protestant attitude was a direct cause of a gentry uprising against the monarch in 1606. The political pamphlets of that time argued that Skarga was a fanatical enemy of religious and political freedom. Skarga was the author of several pamphlets against the so-called Warsaw Confederacy of 1573, a law which guaranteed religious freedom to all denominations including the Socinians. In works such as On the Unity of the Church of God under One Pastor, he strongly supported the union between the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox. His most famous collection of sermons was titled Sermons to the Diet; there he presented a prophetic vision of the Polish kingdom being exposed to danger because of religious anarchy and an excessively liberal political democracy (cf. Williams: 1981, 175– 194). Hieronim Moskorzowski (c. 1560–1625), born to a family of Protestant gentry, studied in Leipzig and Wittenberg. In 1590, he translated into Polish the most famous anti-Jesuit pamphlet, Equitis Poloni in Jesuitas actio prima (as mentioned before, Polish religious polemics were sometimes conducted in Latin). In the 1590s, he became a member of the Socinian church and one of the most devoted collaborators of Faustus Socinus himself. He was one of the authors of the famous Racovian Catechism (1605), which was translated into Latin in 1609, and he wrote a Latin Dedication “To the Most Serene and Powerful Prince and Lord, LORD JAMES, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, etc., etc., My most merciful Lord”, in which he tried to convince the English king that the Catechism contained “divine truth itself as contained in Scripture”. The king was not at all convinced by “his most devoted Jerome Moskorzowski of Moskorzjw”, and there is some evidence that he was in fact offended. The Catechism was publicly burned in London in 1614 by order of Parliament. At that time, the

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English Crown supported mainline Protestantism rather than the more radical groups. Moskorzowski started his activity as a polemical writer in 1607, when he published the first of his pamphlets against Skarga. He also wrote Latin pamphlets against another Jesuit, Marcin S´miglecki, and took part in public disputes with the Carmelites and with the Calvinists. He organised theological debates in Rakjw after the death of Faustus Socinus in 1604, and he was a mediator in many conflicts within the Socinian community (cf. Chmaj: 1957; Pasierbin´ski: 1931; Urban: 1977). In the years 1604–1610, several polemical pamphlets written by these two authors were published successively, and they present an interesting series of controversies. The sequence was as follows: 1604: Piotr Skarga, The Reproach of the Arians and a Summons of Them to Expiation and to the Christian Faith (cf. Skarga: 1604), 1607: Hieronim Moskorzowski, The Removal of the Reproach, Which Piotr Skarga, the Jesuit, Endeavoured to Bring Unfairly upon the Church of the Lord Jesus the Nazarene (cf. Moskorzowski: 1607), 1608: Piotr Skarga, The Second Reproach of the Arians against Mr. Jarosz Moskorzowski from Moskorzjw (cf. Skarga: 1608), 1610: Hieronim Moskorzowski, The Removal of the Second Reproach Which Piotr Skarga, the Jesuit, Endeavoured to Bring Unfairly upon the Church of the Lord Jesus the Nazarene (cf. Moskorzowski: 1610). The first text in the series, The Reproach of the Arians by Piotr Skarga, deals with the fundamental point of the polemic between the two authors: the problem of authority. For the first time in these Catholic-Protestant polemics, the allegory of a tribunal was used. We can recognise two of its functions: first, from the very beginning this allegory puts the opponent in the position of the accused; second, the Jesuit polemicist shows the contrast between the multitude of what he considers to be objective authorities, and a small group of Socinians who interpret the sacred texts subjectively and arbitrarily, thereby producing a new theological system disconnected from traditional authority. Skarga says: “In the name of the Lord I would like to reproach you by the seven Tribunals to which I will bring you to make you see how they condemn the Arian teaching which denies the divinity of Christ, renounces together with Turks and Jews the faith in the Holy Trinity and introduces many gods like the pagans did” (Skarga: 1604). The members of the tribunals which so condemn the Socinians are 1. Jesus Christ himself, 2. the apostles and disciples of Christ, 3. the bishops from all over

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the world when they gather together for Church councils, 4. the doctors of the Church, 5. the holy martyrs, 6. the miracles produced by God “to expose Arian faults”, and 7. the spiritual and imperial laws and “histories and teachings of all knowledge”. In their polemics with the Protestants, the Roman Catholics introduced the notion of statute (the Bible) and the notion of judge (the Church). They argued that a statute cannot interpret itself; it needs a judge to interpret it. The first polemic in the series already mentions problems impossible to negotiate; these problems reappear in the entire series of the polemics. The problem of authority (called here a tribunal) is foremost among them. Is Scripture alone a sufficient authority (described here as a “statute”), or do we need an explanation of Scripture made by a man (described here as a “judge”) who is entitled (has authority) to produce such an explanation? The problem of the authority of Scripture which emerged in this dispute has been of crucial importance for all Christian denominations since the Protestant Reformation. The exegetical optimism of the first reformers was expressed by Heinrich Bullinger, who said that “because it is the Word of God, the holy biblical Scripture has adequate standing and credibility in itself and of itself”. Martin Luther held similar views; during the famous Leipzig disputation in 1519, his opponent Johann Eck was forced to argue against him that “scripture is not authentic without the authority of the Church” (cf. McGrath: 1988). Only the later generations of reformers realised that the problem is much more complex. One hundred years after Luther’s first public appearance as a reformer of the Church, only Socinians accepted the biblical optimism of the early Reformation. Other Protestant denominations had introduced restrictions on how Scripture should be interpreted. The next issue in this polemic also has to do with the authority of Scripture and the origin of this authority : who gives human beings the ability to understand the Holy Writ? The Socinians claimed that Christ himself gives it and therefore mediation of either the Church or the Pope is not necessary. In such a way Scripture becomes – to use the terminology employed by the polemicists – both a statute and a judge. On the other hand, Catholics claimed that Scripture is only a “statute” and that there are a number of judges, primarily St. Peter and his successors, i. e. representatives of the hierarchic Church. According to Skarga, “[i]n the Church Scripture alone is not a tribunal just as a statute alone is not a judge” (cf. Skarga: 1608). The dispute about ways of understanding the authority of Scripture has to do with the fundamental ideological difference between the two camps: the radical interpretation of the principle of sola Scriptura was set against the Roman Catholic rule as explained by the Decretum de canonicis Scripturis issued by the Council of Trent, which gave a warning that “nobody who bends the Bible to his opinions is permitted to explain the Scripture [because he would argue] against

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its real meaning which was and is explained by the Holy Mother Church. The Church alone has the right to judge the true meaning and interpretation of the Holy Scripture” (cf. Głowa: 1988). The allegory of a tribunal is an axis around which Skarga’s polemical statements in The Second Reproach are arranged. The central chapter of Skarga’s pamphlet is titled “The silent Holy Scripture cannot be the tribunal and the main capital of God’s truth by itself without human interpretation”. Skarga argues against the subjective exegetical optimism of his opponent, while Moskorzowski in his Removal of the Second Reproach tries to refute Skarga’s arguments. Let us take a look at the main points of this discussion. The Protestants argued that “right reason” is enough to interpret the Bible, and that anyone can do so, and should. The Jesuit’s argument begins with the material substance from which copies of the Bible are produced: “scripture is made of paper and printing ink; anybody can erase, falsify and burn it and above all can misunderstand it using his own reason”. The Socinian writer replies that it is impossible to “erase, falsify and burn” all copies of the Bible. The next argument deals with the obscurity of many passages of the Bible: “The Holy Scripture is obscure and profound and difficult to understand, so I do not know how anybody is able to judge concerning something that cannot be understood by everybody”. He admits, however, that “Certainly, there are other things in it that are easy and useful for morals and other needs”. Moskorzowski replies: “You can judge a simple man according to what he understands, and a wise man according to what he understands, and thus you can pass judgment on everything in its proper sphere”. In order to prove that the Socinians are usurpers and have no right to explain the Holy Writ, Skarga uses a rhetorical figure called congeries, containing a series of amplified rhetorical questions. He says the following: “Who opened the minds of the Arians? Who gave them the Holy Ghost? Who entrusted them with the keys to mysteries of the Kingdom of God? Let them say this”. He goes on to say that “Because of the weakness of the human mind God gave us medicine – translators and explainers in order to make us not fond of ourselves and suspicious of our own understanding, and to make us remember what Our Lord said: If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things?” Moskorzowski observes only that “The Bible does not show that God gave us explainers of Scripture because of the weakness of human understanding, but it shows only that our understanding is dull in earthly things and much more in heavenly things”. In this part of the discussion, one can see a fundamental difference in attitudes towards human understanding and human reason. According to the approach accepted by all Socinians, “healthy human reason” is the only judge in religious matters. Scripture is a norm (“statute”), and every human being,

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“thanks to the blessing of healthy [right] reason, can understand Scripture and make statements about it even before he is enlightened by the Holy Spirit” (Stegmann in Ogonowski: 1991, 273; cf. Wiszowaty : 1960). The Jesuit writer discredits the role of reason, calling it “a little reason”. Thus a fundamentally different understanding of the limits of human reason makes any agreement or even common ground impossible to achieve. A few years before the discussion between Skarga and Moskorzowski took place, the Socinian scholars in the Rakjw Theological School concluded that “God did not appoint anybody on earth to the office of a judge commissioned to give decisions dealing with religious controversies” (cf. Ogonowski: 1991, 263). Consequently, the reason of each individual is the only judge in these matters. Skarga devoted so much attention to the problem of the judge for obvious reasons. These reasons, again, have to do with authority. Skarga argues that “if Scripture was a judge in religious matters, all heretics would soon reach a settlement”. He thinks that external authority is essential for the process of interpretation of the Bible, so he presents another important argument: “A statute is not a judge, and a judge is not a statute but should only pass judgments according to statutes and the law”. Further on, he remarks that Scripture is silent, so one should go to the tribunal for an interpretation. The Socinian polemicist’s counter-arguments are based on his reliance on reason: “a statute will judge a clever man at his home. And everybody recognises that a statute is a judge. So if a statute can judge him at home, God’s law included in the Scripture can do it as well and even much better”. The Jesuit polemicist draws a comparison between a thief and a heretic. “When a thief robs me, I will escort him to a court; when a heretic wants to let me down, leads me to hell and robs me of my truth – am I not allowed to take him before a judge? I take him to the Holy Scripture but the Scripture is silent and he explains it how he wishes. I must go to the tribunal which is not silent but speaks; I must go to the genuine truth which will instruct and warn me”. This argument is based on several assumptions: as a Roman Catholic, Skarga knows the only real truth (“he robs me of my truth”), while his opponent does not know it, and thus he is a thief that leads the Catholic astray. The Socinian writer replies that theft and heresy are two different things: “Highly simile dissimile. There are two very different things: theft committed by a thief and the problem of somebody whom Father Skarga called a heretic. Theft is an obvious evil; attempts to understand the Bible, on the other hand, far from being evil, are in fact good, virtuous, and recommended by the Lord himself in Scripture”. This particular comparison of Skarga’s (between a thief and a heretic) is very powerful. In many countries at that time, such a metaphor would have meant torture and stakes. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, even in the worst periods of intolerance, there was no torture or stake for the heretic.

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Skarga’s opinions are further expressed in passages such as this one: “If the state is Christian, [it should] aid its citizens or subjects in achieving eternal salvation by supporting and causing them to embrace the true and saving religion. Toleration is at best a provisional necessity because of the large number of heretics” (cf. Williams: 1981). The Socinian disputant tries to impair the quasi-juridical arguments used by his antagonist. He claims that Scripture is a very specific norm, and not a legal one; it cannot be compared to earthly statutes and its interpretation cannot follow the ways appropriate for earthly judges: “For universal earthly peace an earthly judge is needed, but for peace of conscience we do not need such a judge. Faith comes from listening to the Word of God and not from constraint or the judge’s decree”. The whole matter was fated to be irresolvable from its very beginning because each of the disputants held assumptions that he could not renounce. The Jesuit disputant assumed that the Socinian heresy was an objective evil, a painful blow to the unity of the Church and, consequently, to the unity of the state (cf. Tazbir : 1984; Obirek: 1994). The Socinian held fast to his belief in the power of reason to interpret Scripture. These biblical and theological disputes had political consequences. Heresy had been legal in Poland since the Warsaw Confederacy of 1573, which allowed all denominations to exist peacefully in the Kingdom. In 1578, this law was entered in the book of Polish statutes and laws. This was strongly detested by the Jesuits. In his sermons Skarga warned that “the disunity will bring unto you slavery that will bury your liberties and turn them into mockery. You will become like an abandoned widow, you who govern other peoples; and you will become for your enemies an object of ridicule and derision”. For the Socinian, however, the freedom to interpret the Bible and other theological freedoms were key values. Human reason (called “a little reason” by the Jesuit polemicist) was claimed to be paramount in these studies. For Skarga, the Scripture was a statute and representatives of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy were judges who interpreted this statute and passed judgments in agreement with it. According to the Socinian, Scripture was a norm which passed judgments of its own, if a person read it with faith and used his/her own right reason. The authority of the Church was thus pitted against the authority of a single human being, and pressure used by the Church was juxtaposed with the assumed free will of an individual. However, the mainline Protestants soon curbed their optimism as to the possibility of leaving the Bible entirely open to individual interpretations. They noted that if such freedom is allowed, the foundational beliefs of Christianity, such as the Trinity, are in danger of being denied. Thus it would be an oversimplification to say that the dispute between Skarga

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and Moskorzowski was a dispute between representatives of the Counter-Reformation and the Reformation. At that time, the denominations which belonged to the so-called “magisterial Reformation”, i. e. the Calvinists and the Lutherans, were far away from the original “exegetical optimism” represented by the Socinian and the Anabaptist “radicals”. As Norman Sykes observed in the Cambridge History of the Bible: sola scriptura was… the harbinger not of peace but of a sword; and a sword of such sharpness as to pierce… the joints and marrow of Protestantism. Welcomed at first as a… defense against… Rome… and Trent… it was now suffering assault from the rear at the hands of Socinus and his followers. Socinian views… offered an obvious and tempting target for Roman Catholic polemic against Protestantism in general. It became evident that “The Bible only” was an insecure basis even for so fundamental a tenet of orthodoxy as the doctrine of the Trinity (Greenslade: 1963).

The Institutes of the Christian Religion by Calvin, Luther’s catechisms and other such works had tried to shape, control and direct biblical studies towards the needs of the established churches. The freedom of Bible studies among Protestants was also restricted in Poland by systems of rules such as the Consensus Sendomiriensis, announced as early as 1570, which – as Beresford J. Kidd stated in his classic anthology of Documents Illustrative of the Continental Reformation – “effected a union between Lutherans, Calvinists and Bohemian Brethren against the anti-Trinitarians in Poland and so marked out the traditional limits of the later evangelical or protestant orthodoxy” (Kidd: 1911). It was characteristic of the Socinians that – although they had their own catechisms and rules of faith established by successive synods – their freedom of theological research was immense, with virtually no limits or restrictions, as witnessed by the famous theological seminars in Rakjw which were presided over by Socinus himself. Theological differences between Socinianism on the one hand and other denominations on the other were enormous and the gap was impossible to fill. A dispute with a Socinian was a great challenge for a Roman Catholic theologian because from the very beginning it was certain to end in conflict. It also presented a challenge for the “mainline” Protestant denominations such as the Lutherans and the Calvinists of that time. The problem with the Polish Brethren was not just the interpretation of the Bible, but the fact that they refused to obey the laws of the country while at the same time availing themselves of the protection which being citizens of that country entailed.

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2.7.5 Conclusion What is the significance of these polemics for us today, when nearly four hundred years have elapsed since they took place? First, we have to observe that the diverse methods of the polemics – some of them aggressive and personal and others intellectual and theological – can be found in the works of writers from both sides. Second, they clarify for us some misunderstandings about Polish social history. Some historians have claimed that the tolerant Poland of the sixteenth century was damaged by illiberal, dogmatic Counter-Reformation preachers who led Polish society into the intolerant and bigoted seventeenth century. As we can see from the above, the situation was much more complicated. With great enthusiasm, the Socinians introduced new religious concepts which were completely unacceptable to the majority of society and were perceived to be dangerous to both Catholics and Protestants, as well as to the state. Furthermore, the Socinians (otherwise called the Polish Brethren) who belonged to the gentry wanted to use the privileges of their social class without fulfilling their civic duties such as military service. Until the mid-seventeenth century, their leaders scorned the legal order of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth because, according to their theology, all laws – theological, political, and social – could be interpreted ad hoc by whoever cared to interpret them. Such a situation was unacceptable within the parameters of a human community. The idea that the Socinians excelled in tolerance while the Polish state eventually became intolerant of them is one of the greatest misunderstandings of European history. It is true that they allowed free theological discussion, but they excluded from their church anybody who did not agree with the theological ideas for which the majority of the congregation voted. But the main point of contention was that they refused to obey the laws of the country while at the same time claiming the protection and privileges which accrued to them as members of a particular class in a particular country. In other words, they wanted to have their cake and eat it at the same time. In sixteenth-century Poland, there existed a tolerant environment for discussion, but neither side was willing to abandon its principles. Therefore these polemics can be viewed as a confrontation between two groups of well-educated intellectuals and theologians who were seriously involved in the search for religious identity but could not find any common ground. One may call all of them religious fanatics. I think, however, that although we should praise the old Polish Republic for what we now call “tolerance” (the notion expressed by this term today was unknown to sixteenth-century disputants), concepts such as “tolerance” or “fanaticism” are really projections of our present ideas onto centuries past. They should be used with caution both by cultural historians and by

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individuals who would like to think seriously about history and contemporary events.

3.

Between Luther and Socinus: Polish Poets in the Age of the Reformation

3.1

Jan Kochanowski and Polish Confessional Dilemmas in the Mid-16th Century

3.1.1 Jan Kochanowski – the Finest Poet of the Polish Renaissance: a Bio-Bibliographical Sketch Jan Kochanowski, a Polish Renaissance poet, is universally acknowledged as the most prominent poet in Polish literature and even the whole of Slavonic literature prior to the 19th century. He was born in around 1530 (between 1529 and 1531) in Sycyna near Radom, central Poland in a middle-class noble family, and died on 22 August 1584 in Lublin, a city south-east of Warsaw. After completing his elementary education at local schools he studied at the Cracow Academy (later known as the Jagiellonian University) from 1544 to c. 1547. After 1547 he may also have studied in Wrocław (Breslau), Leipzig and Wittenberg. In 1552 (or 1551–1552) he resided in Königsberg, the capital of the Duchy of Prussia, a Lutheran state ruled by the Polish king’s cousin, Duke Albrecht of Hohenzollern. Königsberg, now Kaliningrad (;Q\Y^Y^TaQU) in Russia, was at that time a very important academic, cultural and publishing centre. In 1552–1555, 1556–1557 and 1558–1559 he studied at the University of Padua, where numerous sons of Polish noble families travelled to receive higher education. During his studies he did not receive any academic degrees, but his excellent knowledge of Latin, Greek, poetics, rhetoric and philosophy, evidenced in later works (including his Latin elegies), proves that his studies were very intensive and fruitful. In 1556, before his second trip to Padua, Kochanowski returned to Königsberg, and his correspondence with Duke Albrecht shows that he was in very close contact with the eminent protector of Lutheranism; the duke financially supported his Italian studies. There is no evidence, however, that Kochanowski converted to Protestantism, although in his later literary works he presented a humanist and non-denominational approach to Christian religion.

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During the last stage of his stay abroad, Kochanowski travelled to France and there met Pierre Ronsard, the prominent French Renaissance poet, who was a great promoter of composing poetry in vernacular languages. After returning to Poland, Kochanowski started his career at the courts of leading church and state dignitaries. In 1562 he published his first book – a poem entitled Zuzanna (Susanna), based on a popular tale from the biblical Book of Daniel, accompanied by a song entitled What do you want from us, Lord, for Thy generous gifts. The book was dedicated to the wife of Prince Mikołaj Radziwiłł, a powerful protector of Calvinism in Lithuania. From the early 1560s the poet was associated with the influential clergymen Filip Padniewski and Piotr Myszkowski, and served at the court of King Sigismund Augustus as the king’s secretary. Kochanowski travelled extensively with the royal court to various cities in Poland and Lithuania, including Vilnius, Knyszyn, Cracow, Piotrkjw Trybunalski, Lublin and Warsaw. He wrote at that time numerous Polish epigrams and songs. In the late sixties he was spending increasingly more time on his country estate, Czarnolas. In the early 1570s, after the death of King Sigismund Augustus, he was involved in the first free election of a Polish king – that of Henri of Valois, who secretly left Poland soon after accepting the throne when he learned about the death of his brother, King Charles IX of France. Later Kochanowski refuted in Latin the poems of Philippe Desportes, who was deriding Poland and justifying the king’s escape. Kochanowski became a great admirer of the next elected Polish king, the Transylvanian prince Stefan Batory (Istv#n B#thory); Batory did not know the Polish language, so Kochanowski wrote at that time a large number of occasional poems in Latin, very often the same poem in two languages. In 1575 he married Dorota Podlodowska, the daughter of an influential nobleman. In 1580, after the death of his beloved daughter Orszula, he published a series of Laments, and he spent the last four years of his life preparing his literary output for publication. In 1584 two collections of his poetry were published – a volume of Latin elegies and epigrams (Elegiarum Foricoenia eiusdem libri IV, Epigrammatum libellus) and a volume of Trifles in Polish. In 1585, after the death of the poet, his friend and publisher Jan Januszowski published his collective works in a volume entitled simply Jan Kochanowski, and in 1586 he published Kochanowski’s Polish songs in two volumes. The most important of Jan Kochanowski’s works are as follows: Fraszki (Trifles), Pies´ni (Songs), Odprawa posłjw greckich (The Dismissal of Greek Envoys) and Treny (Laments/Threnodies). Trifles is a collection of poems which vary in length and topic, from pieces about everyday life at the royal court and erotic and obscene poems to philosophical poems, and even prayers. The etymology of this word (from Italian “frasca”) may suggest the banality or insignificance of epigrams. It must be remembered, however, that the word refers to the specific philosophy of human life preached by Kochanowski, as expressed in

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the famous trifle On human life: “Everything we think is but a trifle, / Everything we do is but a trifle. / In this world there’s no dependable thing, / In vain man cares here about anything” (translated by Michael J. Mikos). This world view returns in Laments – a series of funeral poems written after the death of his daughter. The eleventh Lament begins with this statement: “Virtue: a trifle! – stricken Brutus found. / A trifle, if you see it in the round. / Has piety ever brought salvation? / A lurking foe entangles men’s affairs / With no distinction between good and bad” (translated by Adam Czerniawski). Kochanowski’s epigrams are immersed in a broader literary tradition. Epigrams – short, witty poems, describing various events, situations, and people – have been written since ancient times (see e. g. The Greek Anthology, the poems of Anacreon, and Martial’s Epigrammatum liber). Kochanowski’s anecdotes and jokes are also based on Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Adagia and Andrea Alciati’s Emblems and are influenced by the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca. The scholars usually distinguished the following groups of trifles: first, jokes and humorous anecdotes; second, erotic and obscene poems; third, witty and ironic poems for friends; and fourth, autobiographical and autothematic poems. The collection of Kochanowski’s Songs in two volumes was published after his death in 1586. His songs originate from two traditions – Polish folk poetry and Horace’s Carmina. Approximately one third of Kochanowski’s songs are modelled in whole or in part on Horace’s odes. He paraphrased them in a skilful way – eliminating the ancient realities, removing mythological themes and names, and adapting the poetic reflection to the local situation. Kochanowski’s songs can be divided into several groups – songs about love, social life, and nature; patriotic, religious and philosophical songs; and songs about the role of poets and poetry in society. His love songs are based not only on Horace, but also on Roman elegy (Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid), and on the poetry of Francesco Petrarca. The dominant philosophy of most of his songs is influenced by the Horatian theme of “carpe diem”, an epicureic idea of making the best use of life as long as it is possible. The ideas of virtue and fortune are often juxtaposed in the songs. In these poems Kochanowski keeps his distance from contemporary political developments and looks at them from the point of view of a moralist who does not take part in current events. Religious poetry is also an important part of the collection. The most characteristic expression of the poet’s Renaissance religion is the Neoplatonic song What do you want from us, Lord, for Thy generous gifts, expressing praise of the invisible God through praise of the visible world; the beauty and harmony of the world are clear evidence that the world was created by God and is the image of God. The Dismissal of Greek Envoys is the first Renaissance humanist tragedy written in the Polish language. The plot was based on The Iliad and also on The History of Troy – a spurious account of people who witnessed the fall of Troy,

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written in the 4th or 5th century AD and published in Polish translation in 1563. 16th-century Poland was not influenced by such important literary trends and genres of that time as commedia dell’arte or Spanish and Elizabethan drama. The Dismissal of Greek Envoys as a classicist Renaissance tragedy was not a continuation of any Polish literary tradition and did not influence subsequent Polish drama. The tragedy arose directly from Kochanowski’s fascination with ancient and Renaissance playwrights, whose works he studied during his stay in Italy : Euripides, Seneca, and a typical representative of the Italian classical tragedy of this period, Gian Giorgio Trissino, the author of Sofonisba. Kochanowski made an attempt to write a universal tragedy, in which he expressed civic concern about the situation of the state – this concern is represented by the figure of Antenor, and in the final dramatic speech of Cassandra. There are obvious allusions in the tragedy to the current situation of Poland, especially the inefficient system of government and the selfish mentality of the ruling class. Both these factors resulted in an inability to resist an external threat. Kochanowski’s drama, centring on the Greek envoys who demanded the return of the kidnapped Helen of Troy, was constructed according to the rules of classical tragedy established in Aristotle’s Poetics, as well as Renaissance normative poetics such as the work of Julius Caesar Scaliger. Laments is a series of 19 poems of various lengths written after the death of the poet’s beloved daughter, Orszula. Jan Kochanowski’s Laments are among the few masterpieces of Polish literature which unquestionably deserve to be included in the canon of world literature. The Laments gained their prominent position not only because they address universal existential questions, employing imagery and metaphors easily understood in Western culture, and using the poetic form imitating the traditional classical funeral poem, i. e. the epicedium. It is not the original topic of a child’s death discussed in the poem that made it a canonical work (Jean Delumeau points out in his La Civilisation de la Renaissance that such elaborate poems in praise of a deceased child were at that time exceptional). The significance of the Laments does not rise out of their rhetorical sophistication, classical erudition, or unique structure. The unsurpassed quality of the Laments lies in the fact that Kochanowski was successful in combining a deeply personal, existential message with an erudite and complex poetic composition which included numerous allusions to both ancient and Christian traditions. The poems can be read on various levels – as simple expressions of grief written by an unfortunate father and as a sophisticated work of literature full of allusions, quotations, and theological and philosophical statements. For that reason it is equally appreciated by both ordinary readers and professors of poetry. Scholars still debate about the central message of the poem – whether it is purely Christian or includes ambiguous statements of a Renaissance intellectual whose religion is influenced by ancient, humanist and Prot-

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estant views on the condition of man. This series of poems was so unique and innovative at that time that even Kochanowski’s publisher and friend, Jan Januszowski, considered it appropriate to justify the poet’s work and explain his poetry to unknown critics who claimed that it was improper to devote a serious funeral poem to a child. Many traditional interpretations of Laments emphasised the fact that it is a poem about Orszula, is devoted to the death of a child and forms “a monument of family life”. This is true, but the Laments are first of all a poem about a great religious and philosophical crisis of a Renaissance man of letters, and the death of the poet’s daughter is just a pretext for reflections of a father who is the main hero of the poem. There have been numerous articles in English and other foreign languages devoted to this outstanding achievement of Polish Renaissance poetry. There are five modern translations of the whole cycle into English – an exceptional situation in the reception of 16th-century Eastern European poetry : by Dorothea Prall Radin (1928), Adam Czerniawski (1996, 2nd ed. 2001), Michael J. Mikos (1995), a joint translation by two poets: a Harvard professor, Stanisław Baran´czak, and a Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney (1995), and recently a translation by Barry Keane (2001). No other Polish poetic work has been so widely discussed in encyclopaedias and scholarly articles published in English-speaking countries.

3.1.2 Jan Kochanowski’s Religion: Protestant? Erasmian? Catholic? Jan Kochanowski (also known as Jan of Czarnolas) is one of the famous Renaissance authors, present in all school and academic textbooks, about whom allegedly everything has been already written, at least in Polish. However, it seems that many questions remain unanswered, and that researchers are lost in contradictions concerning the most fundamental problems (cf. Janicki: 1999). This essay will be devoted to one such problem, namely the poet’s religious views and denominational affiliation. As early as in the 17th century, Wespazjan Kochowski in a poem entitled Apology for Jan Kochanowski made an attempt to defend Jan of Czarnolas against allegations that he had departed from Roman Catholic orthodoxy. The arguments which Kochowski presented against these unknown “slanderers” are not very original or convincing. As a proof of the poet’s orthodoxy he mentioned Kochanowski’s dedicatory poem to his rendering of the Psalter, addressed to Bishop Piotr Myszkowski, the translator’s close friend. However, this Psalter has always been a flagship proof of Kochanowski’s religious ambiguity, because of both the religiously neutral approach to its translation and – as a result – its popularity in Protestant circles. Another of Kochowski’s arguments – a fragment of Kochanowski’s poem “Satyr”, in which the main character attacks the Prot-

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estants – is not well-aimed because (as Wiktor Weintraub rightly points out) “the very fact of putting teachings on Christian morality into the mouth of an ancient Satyr is a risky move, and such moralizing is easy to question” (Weintraub: 1977). Likewise, Kochanowski’s poem Zgoda (Consent), cited by Kochowski, is a controversial proof of Catholic orthodoxy ; nor indeed can his Fraszki (Trifles), also mentioned by Kochowski, serve as a good argument, even if one ignores openly anti-Catholic and frivolous pieces such as Na heretyki (On Heretics, III, 22), O gospodyniej (On a Hostess, I, 74) and Na ´swie˛tego ojca (On the Holy Father, I, 44). Another Baroque poet, a Jesuit named Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, lamented over Kochanowski’s departures from Catholic orthodoxy in his Lectures on poetics (cf. Sarbiewski: 1958; Pelc: 1965). Sarbiewski concluded that the blasphemies expressed in Lament XI are merely a manifestation of poetic madness, and that the closing couplet (“O grief, why press so hard? No consolation / Can cheer, and now I fear the loss of reason” – transl. by Barry Keane) is a rhetorical figure – a palinode – recanting blasphemies expressed previously. Regardless of how one evaluates Sarbiewski’s interpretation, we are far from reaching a conclusion regarding the religious character of the Laments. The best example of how differently Kochanowski’s religious attitudes can be interpreted is two completely contradictory statements by scholars writing about this series of poems. Stanisław Windakiewicz claimed that The Laments are Kochanowski’s confessio fidei; they constitute the poet’s public act of faith and acknowledgement of Christianity, repudiation of [his] hitherto practiced humanism and a token of affiliation with the devout Catholics (Windakiewicz: 1930).

On the other hand, Julian Krzyz˙anowski wrote that the consolation expressed in the Laments “has little in common with Christian metaphysics in general and Roman Catholic in particular” (Krzyz˙anowski: 1978). Who is presented in the texts written by Kochanowski: a rationalistic humanist and neo-Platonist, or – as we would say today – a liberal Catholic, not adhering strictly to official doctrines, or perhaps a deist, maybe a Protestant, maybe even a Nicodemist, i. e. someone publicly proclaiming religious views different from those actually professed? Or perhaps he was even a crypto-antitrinitarian? Even such an absurd-sounding hypothesis cannot be rejected in light of the discussions held so far. Was Kochanowski, at least in his youth, a Protestant, who for the sake of his safety or because of his own conformism pretended, especially during his stay in Italy, that he was Catholic? The hypothesis that Kochanowski was a Lutheran in his youth should be studied in more detail. The poet had close relations with Duke Albrecht Hohenzollern, the ruler of the Duchy of Prussia, a Lutheran country associated closely with the Kingdom of Poland. Kochanowski went abroad on a scholarship

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granted by the duke. Although it still remains uncertain – despite considerable scholarly research – whether the poet actually adopted Lutheranism, this hypothesis is not unreasonable and seems to be confirmed in Andrzej Trzecieski’s elegy “about the beginning, progress and growth of the holy gospel in countries subject to the Polish King after the revelation of the Antichrist” in which he writes of the development of the Reformation in Poland. The elegy was quoted in the context of Kochanowski’s alleged Protestantism, but without paying attention to the fact that Trzecieski was speaking here not about one person, but about the family of Kochanowskis, “who thanks to their learning are the great pride of their homeland”. In Silva II, 2, devoted exclusively to Jan Kochanowski, the author does not mention his alleged sympathies towards Lutheranism, athough another Silva, dedicated to Duke Albrecht, is entirely devoted to the Prince as a “Defender of the Lutheran Faith” (cf. Trzecieski: 1958). Kochanowski spent more than a year in Königsberg, studying at the university, staying at the court of Duke Albrecht, and using his scholarship for his studies in Italy. However, even if Kochanowski formally signed a Lutheran confession of faith, this alleged pragmatic decision and his relations with Prince Albrecht (as well as subsequent contacts with Mikołaj Radziwił Czarny, protector of the Reformed church in Lithuania) are not proofs of a decisive change of denomination based on strong, religious motivation. The arguments of Stanisław Kot and other scholars that the absence of Christ, the Mother of God and veneration of saints in Kochanowski’s religious poetry testifies to the poet’s Protestant sentiments cannot be taken seriously (cf. Awianowicz: 2010, Małłek: 1966). If we accepted such criteria, the absence of Christ in his poetry would disqualify him also as a devout Protestant poet! It is interesting, however, that no religious poetry was written when the poet was in Königsberg, in a community so intensively involved in promoting the new Lutheran faith. It is also difficult to say whether the anti-papist Latin elegy no. 10 (from the so-called Osmjlski manuscript) is evidence of the poet’s Protestant sympathies, or rather a manifestation of his sympathy for humanistic tendencies in Catholicism and an expression of anti-clerical and anti-papal sentiments, widely present in the Roman Catholic church at that time. One obviously cannot treat them as insignificant jokes, like Kochowski did with the Trifles in his apology. As Wiktor Weintraub wrote, “in the whole poetic output of Kochanowski one cannot find – with the exception of a song about the devastation of Podolia by the Tartars (II, 5) – a work equally passionate, equally full of condemnation and outrage” (Weintraub: 1977). However, the level of emotion in his anti-papist elegy tells us nothing about any possible change in the poet’s religious affiliation and we cannot risk a hypothesis, as in the case of Mikołaj Se˛p Szarzyn´ski, who during his stay in Italy allegedly converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism. This hypothesis about Szarzyn´ski’s conversion from one denomination to another is indeed difficult to prove, but undoubtedly in his case

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we have a testimony of deep inner conversion, which is, however, not necessarily related to a change in religious denomination. How was it in Kochanowski’s case? Let us consider again his early works. There is a hypothesis proposed by Wacław Urban and Stanisław Grzeszczuk, interesting but unfortunately poorly grounded, that the mysterious “gathering in the Sandomierz region” in 1559 – during which Kochanowski’s song What do you want from us, O Lord was presented and praised publicly by Mikołaj Rej – was one of the Protestant religious synods in Pin´czjw (Grzeszczuk: 1992). Did Rej, a prominent Calvinist poet, express his enthusiasm during a synod (if this was a synod) about a piece written by a talented follower of Protestantism, or did he only admire the great talent of a young poet, expressed in a song praising God, the Creator of all things, worshipped by everyone: Jews, Catholics and Protestants? There are also poems about religious issues in the collection of Trifles. It could be argued that these texts are full of contradictions: derision of the papal envoy and the Pope himself were accompanied by satirical remarks about heretics and unambiguously devout poems like A Prayer for Rain. Scholars who complain about the difficulties in the reconstruction of the poet’s views based on his works seem to forget about his self-reflexive trifle entitled To the Trifles. The poet warns in it that the reconstruction of his views based on the exegesis of his poems is doomed to failure, and adventurers who want to discover something will be wandering around a maze and “misguided paths”. Let us make an attempt, however, to enter these “misguided paths” and try not to get lost on them. Several articles and chapters on Kochanowski’s “religious poetry” (cf. Weintraub: 1991), “religiousness of poetry” (cf. Graciotti: 1989) and even “Kochanowski’s religion” (cf. Weintraub: 1977) have been published so far but attempts to reconstruct a uniform or changing system of “Kochanowski’s religion”, incompatible with the existing doctrinal systems, are difficult to defend, and even difficult to understand. Moreover, it would be justified to say that in Kochanowski’s works there are no contradictions to Roman Catholic orthodoxy. However, no scholars who have discussed this issue so far would agree with such an unambiguous statement. In a debate about the various ambiguities in Kochanowski’s statements, one should remember the different issues of everyday life in his time, associated with efforts to obtain favours from various patrons. Consideration for them often determined the tone of his poetical statements. In a trifle or in a privately dedicated elegy one could even scoff at Rome, but not in an elegy associated with the elevation and consecration of his patron who was becoming a bishop. At the same time we do not need, therefore, to suggest any kind of confessional “relativism” or departure from Catholicism, although the poet in his statements, especially those pertaining to his search for protectors, wove his way between

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various positions. However, scholars who have studied this problem have overreached themselves in their proposals. For example, Wiktor Weintraub claimed that Kochanowski’s religious attitude coincided with the “theistic religious universalism of Italian humanists”, which asserted that divinity manifests itself in a similar manner in various religions and philosophical theories and is expressed through the moral and religious consciousness of every noble person. The idea was that of the universal presence of divinity in the nature and consciousness of all people (cf. Weintraub: 1977, 247). This is a very radical statement by this distinguished scholar, and I believe that there is no example in the works of Kochanowski or any biographical fact that can support this opinion. Jan Błon´ski presented similar views, although his opinion, expressed in the context of Mikołaj Se˛p Szarzyn´ski’s conversion, applies to the general intellectual and religious climate of the era, not to a particular writer : Rome or the Reformation: tertium non datur – as we often hear. Well – datur : in elite circles of that time, in the heyday of the Renaissance, a third religion was emerging. Noble and ardent as it was, it could not find its own Church. Trained by philosophers and mystics, heretics and orthodox, by the Brethren of the Common Life and by the devotio moderna movement, Ficino and Pico in Italy, Erasmus in the north, represent the ‘third Christianity’, which did not come to fruition […]. Up until the mid 16th century, however, it competed – in most enlightened minds – with popes and reformers. Neither Catholic nor Protestant, it chose to remain faithful to the traditional Church, in order to – perhaps – transform it from within (Błon´ski: 1966).

Both authors are trying to prove that there existed a non-denominational or “extra-denominational” religion, favoured by humanists. Weintaub seems to suggest that Kochanowski was close to the ideas of a kind of non-denominational theism, and in Błon´ski’s statement there is a contradiction: among the Christians who were supposed to be neither Catholic nor Protestant, there are orthodox Roman Catholics like the Brethren of the Common Life, members of the devotio moderna movement (who influenced Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits), Marsilio Ficino and Erasmus. The latter is often placed among dubious Catholics, although there is no reason to question his Catholic fidelity. As Johan Huizinga reminded us: There had been some question also of numbering Erasmus among the cardinals who were to be nominated with a view to the Council; a considerable benefice connected with the church of Deventer was already offered him. But Erasmus urged the Roman friends who were thus active in his behalf to cease their kind offices; he would accept nothing, he a man who lived from day to day in expectation of death and often hoping for it, who could hardly ever leave his room – would people instigate him to hunt for deaneries and cardinals’ hats! (Huizinga: 2001).

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It is a different matter that his writings, especially editions of the New Testament, were used by various reformers, including Socinians, to challenge Catholic theology. Leszek Kołakowski in his famous essay Erasmus and his God said that “Erasmus’s moral writings were (…) the ‘third power’ of the Christian world in the sixteenth century” (Kołakowski: 2012). There was nothing like Erasmianism as the “third power” of Christianity together with Catholicism and Lutheranism (or, more broadly, Protestantism). No one would deny that Erasmus was an original theologian and that there was a phenomenon called “Erasmianism”, but it was not a movement outside of Catholic orthodoxy. It is very significant that this essay was originally written in 1965 by Kołakowski, still an orthodox Marxist thinker, supported by the Polish Communist authorities, as an introduction to Erasmus’ Enchiridion. Perhaps it fulfilled its role as the Party’s imprimatur for publishing this theological work in a state-sponsored “Library of Philosophical Classics” in 1965, but now its role is only archival; publication of this essay in modern editions of Kołakowski without any comments or updates is surprising. It is a paradoxical stereotype that prominent Renaissance Catholic theologians, Marsilio Ficino and Erasmus of Rotterdam, are considered followers of the “third Christianity”. Jan Błon´ski even suggested that the proponents of this “third way” were de facto Nicodemists: they were professing a different kind of Christianity, but pretended traditional fidelity to the Church. In the case of Ficino and Erasmus such an opinion is unacceptable. There was no “third Christianity” – there were Catholic thinkers who discussed in their writings various theological, philosophical and social ideas, but their intention was not to establish “the third way”. It is better to include – as Salvatore Camporeale puts it – Renaissance humanism as a part of a “triangle”, together with the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation: Humanism emerges as playing, if not an autonomous, certainly a more specific role in the contrast between Reformation and Counter-Reformation. The view that the two were exact opposites, almost mirror reflections of one another, and their consequent historiographical bi-polarization in such a way as to exclude alternatives, has now been superseded, thanks to the recognition of the assertive presence of Renaissance humanism. Indeed, to modern scholarship, humanism re-emerges as a third substantial factor in a period of complex and varied confessional positions. We are now accustomed to thinking not in terms of a bilateral opposition between Reformation and Counter-Reformation, but rather of an ideological triangle, drawn across the whole of Latin and Germanic Christianity. It was within this triangle that the theoretical and practical transformations of this period occurred (Camporeale: 1993).

Renaissance humanism as represented by Kochanowski, Erasmus or Ficino is a part of this “triangle” and not a “third way” of Christianity. The whole problem becomes even more complicated in the case of intellectuals such as Andrzej

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Frycz Modrzewski, who discuss in their works highly sophisticated theological and ecclesiological hypotheses. In the latest, superb monograph about Modrzewski, Steffen Huber discusses Frycz’s thought in the context of “Erasmus, Melanchthon, radical humanists, Thomistic realists, radical nominalists and the Scotist stream in its general understanding” (cf. Huber : 2014). Kochanowski never went in that direction, as he was a poet, not a philosopher. It would be interesting to know Kochanowski’s views about the idea of a national Church. This idea was liked by Modrzewski and some liberal mid-16thcentury Roman Catholic bishops, like Jakub Uchan´ski, the Primate of Poland. However, Kochanowski is silent on this issue, as well as on other topics associated with theology, dogmatics or Church policy. If we decide that he was an Erasmianist it was because he was a follower of a “universalist religious theism” or a “third Christianity”, which stands next to Catholicism and Protestantism. In his works – from early Latin elegies to Laments – he actually expressed different views on religion and churches. This situation does not lead to the conclusion that he was a theist or a Christian “non-denominational” humanist, treating religion in an instrumental way, depending on his career goals. Despite the reservations expressed in the seventeenth century by Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, a Jesuit defending Kochanowski’s Catholic orthodoxy, it is clear that his poems contain nothing against this orthodoxy, although his openness could certainly make his followers anxious, since his religious works were not limited to any church and, for example, his translation of the Psalms was accepted by various denominations. There are many questions which should be asked in connection with the problem of Kochanowski’s religion, such as what it meant to be a Roman Catholic before and after the Council of Trent, especially because there is a tendency to evaluate pre-Trent (and post-Reformation) Catholicism in the context of the Tridentine resolutions. We still do not know much about the religious and philosophical formation of Polish public intellectuals of the 1550s, 60s and 70s – Kochanowski, Frycz Modrzewski and their contemporaries, Renaissance humanists in the middle of the crisis between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.

3.2

Erazm Otwinowski – a Biblical Poet

3.2.1 Erazm Otwinowski – an Adventurous Traveller, Famous Scandalmonger and Modest Poet of the Church: a Bio-Bibliographical Sketch Eram Otwinowski is an almost unknown writer, although articles devoted to him – shorter or longer – are included in all Polish encyclopaedias. My book pub-

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lished in Polish twenty years ago was the first and only monographic work about this best poet of the Polish Brethren. In 1999 I also published a critical edition of his collected poetical works. I believe that in the context of religious literature in early modern Poland-Lithuania, on the peripheries of Europe, his biography and literary output deserve presentation in two case studies which follow this introductory essay – about the biblical contexts of his poetry and about two of his most interesting poetical works – Deeds and Histories of Distinguished Women and Parables of our Lord Jesus Christ. In contrast to other, well-known figures in the Socinian church, mentioned in other parts of this book, Otwinowski was neither a prominent intellectual nor a philosopher. In his poetical works he presented to fellow believers what they knew from the Bible and catechisms, and also from public disputes and debates in which he participated not as a discussant but as a member of the audience. As often happens with popular poetry of average quality, his works presented the beliefs and mentality of his religious community more faithfully than did learned theological treatises. In this case, we can successfully follow the beliefs and mentality of a religious community of radical Polish antitrinitarians. Otwinowski’s work was intended for quite a limited group of readers – the Polish Brethren who knew Polish. When Latin philosophical and theological works by prominent Socinian writers – Faustus Socinus, Johann Crell, Andrzej Wiszowaty and others – were becoming famous both in Poland and later abroad (cf. Ogonowski: 2015), poetry in Polish gradually slipped into oblivion. There is probably one more reason for this oblivion. Reading his works requires specific biblical and theological keys. The writer cultivates specific biblical hermeneutics, transforms biblical phrases, uses biblical language and not only makes use of a biblical stylisation but even in a way identifies himself with the biblical word. This poetry should be read, therefore, as a literary transformation of a sacred text. The second key to reading this poetry is early antitrinitarian theology – difficult to reconstruct, since we do not have general surveys of it, especially of its developmental stage in the 16th century (cf. chapters 2.3, 2.4 and Misiurek: 1983; 1984). Erazm Otwinowski was born in Les´nik (now Lis´nik) in the Lublin province. From 1549 he served at the court of Tiedemann Giese, a close friend of Nicholas Copernicus and a correspondent of Erasmus of Rotterdam and Philipp Melanchthon, until the bishop’s death in 1550. Later he served at courts of Polish magnates, Piotr Kmita and Stanisław Te˛czyn´ski. At least from 1556 he participated regularly in Reformed (Calvinist) synods and later, after the Minor Church emerged, in the antitrinitarian synods of the Polish Brethren. In 1557 he travelled to the Ottoman Empire, including Istanbul. In 1561–1563 he served at the court of a famous magnate-adventurer, Jan Baptysta Te˛czyn´ski, and took part in his famous expedition to bring to Poland a Swedish princess, Cecilia Vasa, with

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whom Te˛czyn´ski fell in love, as did many other admirers of Cecilia in Europe. Otwinowski played a minor role in this unsuccessful expedition – when the Polish adventurers were imprisoned by the Danes, the future poet served twice as an envoy passing letters to the Danish authorities, demanding the release of the delegation. Te˛czyn´ski died in 1563 in a Copenhagen prison and Otwinowski successfully returned home. The best-known incident in his life took place, however, in the following year, on June 1, 1564 (interestingly, four days after John Calvin’s death). Otwinowski – at that time still a Calvinist – defamed the Host during the Corpus Christi procession. This famous event was described in detail by Lubieniecki in his Historia Reformationis Polonicae. Otwinowski’s attack on the priest was exceptionally violent and remembered for a long time: He quickly arose, rushed from the house, and approaching the priest whom he intimately knew, said to him: ‘How many times have I warned you not to do this thing in which you sin against God? And you promised me that you would do it no more. And yet you are obstinate. Repeat the Lord’s Prayer!’ Handing to another the pyx with the host, the priest did as he was bidden. After he recited ‘Our Father who art in heaven’, Otwinowski [broke it and] said that was enough, and reproached him, saying: ‘You said truly that God is in heaven. Then he is not in the bread, and not in your pyx’. [Vere dixisti Deum esse in coelis. Non est igitur in pane, non in pyxide tua.] Thereupon he snatched it, threw it to the ground, and trod it under foot. [Inde hanc correptam in terram projecit et pedibus conculcavit.] All the followers of idolatry were astonished at the unwonted occurrence. Some were amazed and shocked at such unheard-of audacity, others were hot with anger and threatened vengeance, and judged the foolhardy heretic ought to be heavily fined (Lubieniecki: 1685; 1995).

Otwinowski was saved from a trial and punishment by Mikołaj Rej, a famous Polish poet and a Calvinist himself, who according to Lubieniecki said: Otwinowski has offended God allegedly, and certainly a man, a priest. So he will satisfy the latter as the law prescribes, since he will beg his pardon and will repair the damage he has inflicted. This is quite right, and compensation is easily made, that is, if he pays the priest a penny (obolum) for the broken glass, and a farthing (teruncium) for the broken wafer of the host (for with this he can get a new glass and a handful of flour). God’s injury must be left to him to punish, for vengeance is his alone (Lubieniecki: 1995).

This famous incident was one of the most spectacular examples of tension between Calvinists and Catholics in the 1560s. About 1570 Otwinowski joined the Lublin congregation of the Polish Brethren and from that point his life was closely associated with the royal elections. In 1573–1575 Otwinowski actively supported candidates for the Polish throne: first Archduke Ernest of Austria and later Wilhelm von Rosenberg (Vil8m z Rozˇmberka). These activities did not prevent him – like Jan Kochanowski – from praising Stefan Batory (the Transylvanian prince Istv#n B#thory) who finally

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became the king of Poland. Otwinowski actively participated in the life of his church. He was a great-grandfather of Stanisław Lubieniecki, author of the famous Historia Reformationis Polonicae. Research on his life and work was dominated for a long time by the question of whether he was the author of a collection of love poems kept in the Zamoyski Library and published in 1903 as the work of an “Anonymous Protestant”. After studying all available materials and all scholarly debates I am convinced that this old hypothesis of Stanisław Kot, identifying the “Anonymous Protestant” with Otwinowski, is unreliable and also unimportant for the issues discussed in this book. The problem itself is, however, interesting from the point of view of 19thcentury biographical criticism: scholars claimed that in a few fragments of these anonymous poems they found facts proving that their author had been Otwinowski, and other facts, found in other poems, were announced as “new facts in Otwinowski’s biography”. This method was unreliable and there was not enough evidence for the tempting hypothesis that a pious Christian writer was in his youth an author of erotic poems (a typical case in many biographies of Renaissance poets). Below is a list of the works authored by Otwinowski: 1. Wypisanie drogi tureckiej (A Description of the Turkish Journey), manuscript in the Jagiellonian Library in Krakjw. 2. Pies´ni dwie (Two Songs), Krakjw : A. Rodecki, 1582. 3. Sprawy abo Historyje znacznych niewiast (Deeds and Histories of Distinguished Women), Krakjw : A. Rodecki, 1589. 4. Przypowies´ci Pana naszego Jezusa Chrystusa (Parables of Our Lord Jesus Christ), Rakjw : A. Rodecki, 1599. 5. Na obrone˛ Pana Jana Niemojewskiego ksie˛dzu Powodowskiemu (To Father Powodowski in Defence of Mr Jan Niemojewski) – six distichs of a poem published in a polemical book by an antitrinitarian author, Jan Niemojewski, against a polemic by a Catholic theologian, Hieronim Powodowski (Krakjw : A. Rodecki, 1593). There are also a few lost works, including a Conversation of a Baker and a Painter about their Gods (about the Eucharist, known only from a summary by Lubieniecki) and Christian Heroes (Heroes christiani) – a collection of poetical biographies of 170 Polish Protestant activists, including the Polish Brethren; the manuscript was taken abroad after the expulsion of the Polish Brethren in the mid-17th century ; the work was quoted a few times by Lubieniecki and summarised briefly in ten pages by Andrzej We˛gierski (Andreas Wengerscius) in his Slavonia Reformata. Otwinowski remained known in Polish literature as the author of two works which I will discuss in more detail – Deeds and Histories of Distinguished Women

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and especially Parables of Our Lord Jesus Christ, both based on his interpretation of the Bible from the point of view of the radical Reformation congregation to which he belonged until his death in 1614.

3.2.2 Erazm Otwinowski’s Deeds and Histories of Distinguished Women and Parables of Our Lord Jesus Christ as Poetical Transformations of the Bible 3.2.2.1 Deeds and Histories of Distinguished Women A series of poems about famous biblical and historical women should be analysed not only in the context of the Bible but also in the context of Renaissance literature about women, family and marriage. In sixteenth-century Poland, many theological treatises and literary works were devoted to the role of women, usually presenting an ideal, noble wife, sharing with her husband his worries and concerns, a good housewife, thrifty, hard working and peaceful. Many works supporting such an ideal were published in Poland at that time: Stadło małz˙en´skie (Married Life) by Jan Mrowin´ski Płoczywłos, Z˙ywot człowieka poczciwego (Life of a Nobleman) by Mikołaj Rej, Postylla (A Postil) by Krzysztof Krain´ski, Gospodarstwo (A Household) by Anzelm Gostomski, Ksia˛z˙ki o wychowaniu dzieci (Books about Educating Children) by Erazm Gliczner, etc. Additionally, Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was published in 1575 and a praise of women was included in a paraphrase of the medieval pseudo-Aristotelian work Problemata Aristotelis, written by Andrzej Glaber. As in all European countries in the age of the Renaissance and Reformation, anti-feminist approaches were popular in Poland, including in literature (cf. Kuchowicz: 1990; Wyrobisz, 1992). A related work published in the community of the church of the Polish Brethren was Marcin Czechowic’s Zwiers´ciadłko panienek chrystyjan´skich (A Mirror for Christian Maidens), dedicated to Zofia and Zuzanna, the same daughters of Anna Lasocina to whom Otwinowski also dedicated his work. Two writers and friends from the same religious community dedicated their works to daughters (a guide to Christian life) and to their mother (poetical catalogue of famous women). Deeds and Histories is based not only on the Bible but on other works, mentioned below. It is characteristic for this stage of development of the Polish Brethren community that – unlike during the first, radical, anabaptist period – books other than the Bible were accepted as sources of moral teaching. Otwinowski’s book is divided into two parts. The first one consists of eight chapters presenting various categories of women, as in a scholastic catalogue: “devout women in the Old Testament”, “devout women in the New Testament”, “pagan devout women in the Old and New Testaments”, “devout contemporary

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women”, “women who fell because of their weaknesses”, “irreligious women mentioned by the Bible”, “evil women as described by the Holy Spirit”, and finally “horrendous examples of raping and kidnapping women and various publicly known and mysterious unlawful acts mentioned by the Bible”. The second part of the book, which begins with A Description of a Devout and Judicious Wife and Good Hostess, consists of a series of shorter and longer poems about the role of women and family life in the community of the Polish Brethren. It is worth noting that in his paraphrases of biblical texts Otwinowski used not only protocanonical books of the Bible but also deuterocanonical books (the apocrypha in the Protestant tradition), widely citing the following apocryphal books: 1 Ezra, Tobit, Judith, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), and the Story of Susanna (Dan 14 in the Vulgate). The underlying principle of the whole book is to quote 1 Ezra (1 Esdras) as a source of knowledge about the role of women (1 Ezra (Esdras) 4:13–41). This apocryphal fragment is actually the longest and most straightforward praise of women in the whole biblical tradition. 1 Ezra was published both in the Polish Brest Bible used by Otwinowski and in the first edition of the King James Bible. This work, using the Bible so extensively and based on the new Renaissance and Reformation vision of the role of women, required a very specific reading of the Bible, through the prism of “women’s affairs”. Otwinowski’s non-biblical poems were based on Exemplorum libri by Sabellicus (Sabellicus: 1538) and on a Polish “martyrologium protestantium”, the History of Severe Persecution of God’s Church, which was Cyprian Bazylik’s paraphrase of Actiones et monimenta martyrum by Jean Crespin (Bazylik: 1567). In his poems Otwinowski presents dozens of “devout women” – starting from Eve of the Book of Genesis to 16th-century Protestant women-martyrs. His hermeneutical method is based on fidelity to the sources – both the Bible and historical books. However, he is not interested in details but in the meaning of a given figure as an ethical pattern. Sometimes the border between a summary of a biblical or historical event and the author’s commentary is hardly visible. This commentary, in the form of a general conclusion, is usually very short and in most cases the majority of the text is his paraphrase of the original story. What are the consequences of such an approach to literary imitatio? First of all we can see a discrepancy between what is sacred and ethical for a 16th-century antitrinitarian and an Old Testament author. The writer had difficulties with classification of some biblical figures. Especially in the fragments devoted to Susanna (Dan 14) we can see a discrepancy between the ethical radicalism of the writer and an ambiguous presentation of the biblical story. In many other cases attempts to present unambiguous categories of women, good or evil, were difficult when faced with the sacred text. There is, however, no evidence that Otwinowski wanted to point out differences between rigorous New Testament

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ethics and the message of some fragments of the Old Testament. It seems that Otwinowski was not interested in being involved in serious debates taking place in his church about relations between the Old and the New Testament, discussed in polemics between Faustus Socinus and Andreas Dudith, Jacobus Paleologus and Martin Seidel. During these polemics there were difficulties with determining a common attitude to the relations between the two Testaments. As far as ethical issues are concerned, “the explanations of Socinus were close to historism: God could offer the Jews only regulations that could be understood by them; and the promises of rewards had to be adjusted to the character of these regulations and commands”. The essential difference between Socinus and Paleologus can be presented concisely as follows: Socinus claimed that “the Old Testament should always be explained on the basis of the New Testament and not vice versa”. While Catholics and also some Protestants found in the Old Testament arguments in favour of killing those who believed differently or were idolaters, representatives of the radical Reformation, like Socinus or Dudith, “describing the books of the Old Testament as cruel and barbarian, claimed that God when creating them had in mind the exceptionally primitive character of Jewish people of that time. Today Christians are obliged to obey only the ethical rules of the New Testament” (cf. Ogonowski: 1966). We can assume that Otwinowski approved the opinions expressed by Socinus about the functions of the Old Testament rules and regulations and accepted the superiority of the New Testament. However in his Deeds and Histories of Distinguished Women he does not present differences and contradictions but covers them up. His book presents literary portraits of various biblical and historical women, good and evil, presented in an unambiguous way. The criteria for selecting good and evil heroines were based on what was recognised as good and evil in the Bible, regardless of doubt that one might have centuries later, in a different culture. The Bible is its own best commentary and interpreter and its author is God. The author’s decision to add devout heroines included in Exempla by Sabellicus and especially in Bazylik’s/Crespin’s “martyrologium” was clear evidence of a need to sacralise historical figures and create an unofficial cult of saints and martyrs, justified by the Socinian belief in the “holy community”. According to the Socinians the most perfect human being, later made God by his Father, was Jesus Christ (Otwinowski mentioned this belief a few times in his Parables). But except for Jesus there were other human beings who were close to perfection and should be imitated. This was the reason for including in the book portraits of historical figures together with biblical women, sanctioned by the authority of the Word of God. The key poem of the second part of the book, A Description of a Devout and Judicious Wife and Good Hostess, is rooted in two literary traditions. The first is the tradition of the poetry of Jan Kochanowski and his Renaissance praise of the

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family life of the gentry in his Songs. However, with all the similarities in their poetics, Otwinowski presents a different philosophy of life and model of a family. The wife and hostess in Otwinowski’s poem is first of all a devout, religious person. In this respect, the poem resembles a Calvinist Catechism published in 1600 in Vilnius, especially a song about marriage contained within it, which concerns the life of a devout wife and the whole family, and is full of biblical allusions both to the style and content of the Bible. Otwinowski’s poem can be situated between two traditions – the great tradition of Renaissance poetry in the vernacular, originating with Jan Kochanowski, and the poetry of Protestant catechisms, used by the community. Both traditions seem to be important for the poet. Deeds and Histories of Distinguished Women is a typical example of so-called “parenethical literature”, presenting patterns of ideal soldiers, courtiers or women. Numerous literary works about women were published in Renaissance Poland, beginning with the famous translation of Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano by Łukasz Gjrnicki – a work about an ideal courtier but also including an interesting portrait of a “courtly woman”. Other significant works include A Pattern of Virtuous Women by Jan Kochanowski, and Mulier fortis (a paraphrase of The Proverbs of Solomon). There is, however, no work in Polish literature similar to this book by Otwinowski, although various scholars have tried to point out similarities to Kochanowski’s short prose treatise entitled A Pattern of Virtuous Women (cf. Dziechcin´ska: 1972). Although A Pattern is also a collection of stories about particular figures and not a moralistic treatise illustrated by examples, these “patterns” are treated dynamically. At the end of each story there is a summary of the plot, rather than an appended moral conclusion (cf. Pelc: 1978). It is quite the opposite in Otwinowski’s book: his collection of poems about concrete women is a moralistic treatise illustrated by exempla. Deeds and Histories is a part of a very limited communication system confined practically to the community of the Polish Brethren. Kochanowski’s works were intended for a much wider audience. Otwinowski is not Kochanowski’s literary successor. His works are examples of confessional literature, using literary patterns of the Renaissance but created for the church congregation rather than for a general audience of his time. 3.2.2.2 Parables of Our Lord Jesus Christ Parables of our Lord Jesus Christ is another example of such an “elitist” approach to literature. It has not been widely discussed in textbooks of the history of Polish literature, but only mentioned briefly in some of them. In his unpublished book on Zbigniew Morsztyn, a famous antitrinitarian poet of the next generation, the late Donald Pirie claimed that the Parables are a complete overview of topics and

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ideas of the Polish Brethren expressed in a single work. This is an interesting hypothesis, and having myself published a critical edition of the whole work I should say that most theological ideas of the early antitrinitarian church were mentioned in it, despite the fact that – quite interestingly – it pretends to be merely an objective paraphrase of the New Testament, written in the form of parables. The book was written at the climax of a debate between two factions of the church in Little Poland – one radical, represented by former Calvinist ministers Marcin Czechowic and Jan Niemojewski, and one more moderate, represented by a younger generation of theologians not previously associated with Calvinism, e. g. Faustus Socinus, Valentin Schmalz and Krzysztof Lubieniecki (Otwinowski’s son-in–law). Debates about holding public offices and the nature of the Eucharist and also controversies about the preexistence of Jesus Christ (which divided the churches of Lithuania and Little Poland) are present in this work, although very discreetly, since the author’s intention is undoubtedly to present from the antitrinitarian doctrine only such teachings as come directly from the New Testament, paraphrased here in the form of parables. The book is obviously based not only on parables of Jesus but on numerous fragments of the whole New Testament. In the Argument, placed at the beginning of the book, Otwinowski claims simply that Jesus “prawie nic nie mjwił okrom przypowies´ci, by lud snadniej mjgł poja˛c´ niebieskie powies´ci” (Otwinowski: 1999)

i. e. said almost everything in the form of parables, so the people could more easily understand heavenly stories. For Otwinowski “przypowies´c´” (a parable) was both a parable as such – a specific, biblical literary genre – and also everything else that Jesus said – logions, allegories, comparisons, etc. It is evident not only from the title but also from the tendentiously selected mottos of the book – faithful quotations from Matthew, Mark and Luke (translations into English according to the King James Bible): MATTI. XIII Otworze˛ usta moje w przypowies´ciach i opowiem skryte rzeczy od załoz˙enia ´swiata. Matt 13:35 That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world. MAR. IIII Oprjcz przypowies´ci nie mjwił im, wszakz˙e uczniom swoim osobno wszytko wykładał.

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Mark 4:34 But without a parable spake he not unto them: and when they were alone, he expounded all things to his disciples. LUC. VII Wam ci dano znac´ tajemnice Krjlestwa Boz˙ego. a innym przez podobien´stwa. Luke 8:10 And he said, Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to others in parables; that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand.

Otwinowski seems to follow faithfully what Jesus said in Luke 8:10 – the mysteries of the Kingdom of God are available only to the Apostles – but to others in parables. For that reason the whole of Christian doctrine was delivered by the poet in parables. Even poems based on the Epistles of Paul or the Book of Revelation (as well as a few poems based on the books of the Old Testament) are arranged in a structure that resembles the parables of Jesus. The book has an ambition to be a summary of the whole New Testament and a poetical, theological treatise intended – like the gospels – for everyone, not just those learned in Scripture and theology. To almost all 139 poems in the book one or more references are added – 140 to the New Testament and 6 to the Old Testament. As a result of comparative analysis of the poems and the books of the Bible I found 287 more obvious references to the Bible (243 to the New Testament and 44 to the New Testament). Parables was a proposal (for members of the congregation and for every reader) of a hermeneutics for which a parable was not only a fundament of the New Testament kerygma, but a model which helped to organise as uniform structures numerous parabolic and non-parabolic fragments of the Bible. All poems based on the parables (and almost all his other poems) have the structure of a typical parable: – tertium comparationis [the third (part) of the comparison] – explanation (moral and dogmatic truth about the Kingdom of God). – an additional commentary of the author, often referring to current theological debates. Within such a structure – 1+2+3 – its three parts are different in length, but most poems are organised in such a way with possible variants. In some poems parts 1 and 2 are not divided but organised as one entity, i. e. (1+2)+3, while in others the explanation and the author’s commentary are linked together : 1 + (2+3). But all poems have a uniform structure – that of a parable with the author’s commentary.

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According to Otwinowski the structure of a parable organises the whole text of the New Testament. The parables, non-parabolical passages of the gospels and passages from all books of the New Testament and even a few books of the Old Testament are materials for a specific literary procedure: they are arranged in a parabolical structure which becomes the main compositional rule of this book. Otwinowski’s literary method is an interesting example of the Renaissance literary practice of imitatio. Instead of popular imitations of ancient epic poems or elegies we have here imitations of parabolical structures. It seems that Otwinowski’s Parables is an original contribution to the literary practice of Renaissance religious literature in Poland. After a detailed analysis of the whole work it would be difficult to agree with Donald Pirie’s hypothesis that Parables is a complete overview of the concerns and ideas of the Polish Brethren expressed in a single work. The poems included in the book refer only to selected “topics and ideas”, and this is a poetical and not systematic overview of these issues. I believe, however, that Otwinowski’s ambition was much broader : he touched upon some theological issues important for the Polish Brethren, but first of all in this “parabolical” opus vitae he presented a summary of the teachings of the New Testament, presenting the most important topics as “Parables of our Lord Jesus Christ” in a volume which fills approximately 70 pages of its contemporary critical edition.

3.2.3 The Brest Bible and other Polish Translations of the Bible in the Poetical Works of Erazm Otwinowski 3.2.3.1 Introduction The frame of reference determining this particular study is the antitrinitarian perspective on Polish Bible translations and on Scripture-based theology in the second half of the sixteenth century. In his important study on Polish Sacred Philology in the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, David Frick discusses “opinions on the translation and interpretation of Holy Scripture in Polish during the age of confessional debate” (Frick: 1989, ix), and at the same time presents a comprehensive history of Polish Bible translations in the early modern period. The chapter on the Brest Bible, the first Protestant translation of the Bible into Polish, is followed by chapters on two major achievements of Polish biblical philology of the 1570s and 80s: the translations of the Bible by the antitrinitarian authors Szymon Budny (1530–1593) and Marcin Czechowic (1532–1613), both excellent philologists. For the antitrinitarians, the Bible was the only authentic source of their doctrine; it was studied with exceptional diligence, and translations into Polish

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had to be consistent with their theology. Representative views of the Polish Brethren on biblical authority can be found in one of the polemical works by Marcin Czechowic written against the Catholic priest Hieronim Powodowski; it is axiomatic that the Word of God is the only certain, exclusive and exhaustive source of the Christian faith (cf. Czechowic: 1583). The possibility of understanding Scripture is given not by science or even by reason, not by the Pope or even the Church, but by Christ the teacher himself. According to Faustus Socinus (1539–1604), no Church authority is necessary to defend the authority of the Bible (cf. Socinus: 1611; 1618). Scriptural pre-eminence has its source in the Bible itself and the authority of the Old Testament is verified by the authority of the New Testament. Socinus was convinced that thanks to God’s providence the Scriptures were in no part distorted. Accordingly, ackowledging biblical authority is the only means to finding the path to eternal salvation (cf. Socinus: 1959). This confidence in the Bible as the only source of faith was intensified by an animus towards philosophy, and for that matter towards the whole tradition of biblical commentary : “We confine ourselves to the Holy Scipture and do not need that support” (Statorius: 1595). The problem of translating the Bible into vernacular languages was closely connected to this. Translations of the Bible into Polish were based on the textus receptus. While the Brethren tended to acknowledge the achievements of Erasmus of Rotterdam and to treat the 1550 edition of the textus receptus published by Robert Estienne as the canonical version of Scripture, they had in general no desire to be involved in further philological research on the Bible. Debates in the Church on methods of reading the Bible were reduced more or less to the verbal and literal dimensions of the text. On the whole the Polish Brethren accepted the threefold method of interpretation included in Socinus’ early treatise Explicatio primi partis primi capitis Evangelistae Johannis, which was much influenced by Erasmus: first, the comparative method (explaining less clear passages of the Bible using clearer passages); second, the method of philological exegesis (fixing the meaning of words in relation to the whole context); and third, the rationalistic method (the rule of conformity with reason). The Brest Bible (1563) was published during the antitrinitarian crisis in the Polish Reformed Church and just before its division into the Major (Reformed) and Minor (antitrinitarian) branches; it was widely read by all Reformed Protestants in Poland, including antitrinitarians, who were usually seceders from the Reformed church. However, there was a need to have fresh, reliable translations for the new, rapidly growing church. This is the origin of certain masterpieces of Polish biblical translation, authored by Szymon Budny, whose biblical philology was greatly admired by another prominent translator, Marcin Czechowic.

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3.2.3.2 Polish Bible Translations in the Poetical Works of Erazm Otwinowski Within the broader context of Polish biblical translation there will be discussion here of an interesting example of the most prominent antitrinitarian biblical poet of the sixteenth century, Erazm Otwinowski, whose Polish works were poetical versions of biblical passages. Otwinowski (c. 1526–1614) was initially a member of the Reformed Church, but around 1570 he joined the Lublin congregation of the antitrinitarian Chuch of the Polish Brethren. As an active member of the Reformed community he had undoubtedly very often used the Brest Bible. His two major works, Sprawy abo historyje znacznych niewiast [Deeds or Histories of Distinguished Women] (1589) and Przypowies´ci Pana naszego Jezusa Chrystusa [Parables of Our Lord Jesus Christ] (1599) are poetic papaphrases of the Bible. The former is a collection of 250 poems about various biblical women from the Old and New Testaments and about Christian family issues. The latter is a collection of 139 short poems called ‘parables’ of Jesus Christ. As I have already mentioned, although most of them are not based on actual parables of Jesus, almost all of them have the structure of a typical parable: – tertium comparationis [the third (part) of the comparison] – explanation (moral and dogmatic truth about the Kingdom of God) – an additional commentary of the author that often referred to current theological debates. The poems included in these two volumes use biblical language and style. For the scholar interested in the reception of Polish Bible translations, the important question confronts us as to which version of the Bible was used by this poet, a former activist of the Reformed Church who converted to antitrinitarianism. Did he use the Brest Bible, so popular among Polish Protestants, especially Reformed Protestants, or rather the translation of Czechowic, who was a fellow member of the Lublin congregation of the antitrinitarian Church of the Polish Brethren? One might expect that as a devout member and apologist of the antitrinitarian confession, Otwinowski would be a user of the Czechowic translation, so radically different in many important places from the Brest Bible. However, the answer to this question is ambiguous. It is worth noting that before the Brest Bible was published, Otwinowski was using the 1555 Stephanus Latin Bible published in Geneva – his own copy is still preserved today in the collections of Warsaw University Library. Otwinowski had this copy with him at the synod of the Reformed Church in Cracow in May 1563. Indeed, inscriptions by his friends, including Marcin Czechowic, are preserved on blank cards of this Bible (Sipayłło: 1972). Most probably, therefore, he used the Stephanus Bible before the publication of the Brest Bible, since he knew Latin very well, as we know from analysis of his use of Latin sources. In his

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later works, however, he used Polish translations, and by the 1570s and 80s he already had a few Polish versions at his disposal (cf. Wilczek: 1994). The idea of preparing a new translation of the Bible was discussed at Reformed synods in the late 1550s, in which Otwinowski participated. The Brest Bible became a translation widely used not only by the Reformed but also by the Lutherans until the publication of the Gdansk (Danzig) Bible in 1632. Although translations of the New Testament by Budny (1574) and by Czechowic (1577) were published long before the publication of Otwinowski’s biblical works, it is difficult to estimate now how widely they were used, even within their own Polish Brethren community. In this context, it is worth recalling an important remark by David Frick: We should bear in mind that, while Budny and Czechowic were issuing their own new translations, a sizeable group of Polish Protestants was using the reprints of the New Testament from the Brest Bible that were issued in Torun´ in 1585 and Wilno in 1593 (Frick: 1989, 229).

In the case of Otwinowski we need take into account only three translations – the Brest Bible and the two translations of the New Testament by Czechowic. Budny’s translations were not used in the Polish Brethren congregations of Little Poland (Czechowicz’s and Otwinowski’s region) due to substantial theological differences with Budny and the Lithuanian congregations in which he was active and where he published his work (cf. Kot: 1956, 64–118). The Brest Bible was important at that time because it was the only translation including the books of the Old Testament and acceptable for Protestants. Czechowic was Otwinowski’s close collaborator and friend, with whom he probably co-authored two antitrinitarian works – Chłuba jezuicka [The Jesuit Pride], now lost (cf. Płokarz: 1922, 93; Szczucki: 1964, 178, 290), and Bogowie fałszywi [The False Gods], anonymous but thought to be co-authored by them (Kawecka-Gryczowa: 1983). It would of course be difficult to make decisive conclusions based on such a limited number of sources. It is, however, interesting to investigate whether these major poetical works, inspired by the Bible and written by one of the most prominent antitrinitarians, were still based on the Brest Bible or whether they depended rather on the new translations made by members of the new church. Yet, as sixteenth-century authors themselves were well aware, this is a very difficult task. For the biblical translator must follow the biblical text, and his own literary freedom is therefore greatly constrained. When Czechowic accused the Jesuit translator, Jakub Wujek (1541–1597), of plagiarising his translation of the New Testament, another Jesuit polemicist, Marcin Łaszcz, who wrote under the name of Szcze˛sny Z˙ebrowski, refuted these accusations, pointing out that he had translated “literally, word for word” and, therefore, that “he must use the same words that all of us Poles use”, as otherwise he would have had to invent new

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words (cf. Frick 1989, 189–190; Łaszcz: 1597, 67). This is a very apt remark. For Czechowic’s translation was not only a kind of critical response to Budny’s translation, but at the same time included many lexical and phraseological similarities to the Brest Bible. Thus Czechowic himself could also be accused of the same kind of “plagiarism”. Besides, numerous words and phrases used belong to the common vocabulary of the Polish biblical language of the sixteenth century (there are many examples available in the Słownik polszczyzny XVI wieku [Dictionary of Sixteenth-Century Polish]). For this reason it is often difficult to find conclusive evidence that a poetical passage is based on a particular translation of the Bible. As far as the Old Testament is concerned, there is no doubt that Otwinowski used the Brest Bible in his book on women. One can find a number of examples of names which are the same in Otwinowski and the Brest Bible but different in other Polish Bibles (Numbers 25 and 27; 2 Samuel 11, 14 and 21; 2 Kings 22). This is especially evident in three examples of 3 Ezra, an apocryphal book included in the Brest Bible and missing in all other Polish translations of the Bible, both Catholic and Protestant. The Parables of Our Lord Jesus Christ was published in 1599 when the Brest Bible (1563) and two versions of Czechowic’s translation (1577 and 1594) were available. Only three passages in Otwinowski’s Parables are marked as quotations from the Bible. The comparative analysis of these quotations (Matthew 13:35, Mark 4:34 and Luke 8:10) shows that Czechowic’s first edition was used, but there are a number of other examples of words and phrases which can be compared with various editions. 3.2.3.3 Selection of Poems I have selected fourteen poems in which can be found words and phrases taken directly from the Bible. In five cases all of these words and phrases are simply identical in the poems and in the three above-mentioned translations. In the next three cases there are no lexical equivalents in the Bible. Two of these cases are especially interesting. Both are based on Matthew 19:24. The Greek original is identical in all available manuscripts and reads as follows: eqjop¾teqºm 1stim j²lgkom di± tqup¶lator Nav¸dordiekhe?m C pko¼siom eQsekhe?m eQr tµm basike¸am toO heoO (Vulgate: facilius est camelum per foramen acus transire quam divitem intrare in regnum caelorum. King James Version: It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God).

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In all three Polish translations discussed here, this passage begins with the following words: “Łatwiej jest wielbła˛dowi przez dziure˛ igielna˛ przes´´c…”. The first poem referring to this passage is entitled Lina morska [Ship Rope] and discusses this parable as a story about a ship rope which cannot go through the eye of a needle. In the second poem, entitled Wielbła˛d [Camel], Otwinowski mentions a camel and a ship rope; for both it is difficult to go through the eye of a needle. A ship rope is not mentioned in any of the Protestant or antitrinitarian translations, but is mentioned in the margin of the first edition of the New Testament translation by Wujek: “Abo, Linie: bo i te˛ znaczyc´ moz˙e greckie słowo j²lgkom, ale lepiej tak, jako w teks´cie stoi” [Or, a rope, because the Greek word j²lgkom may have this meaning as well, but it is better just as in the text]. This is an interpretation based on the old exegetical tradition highlighted by Mircea Eliade: In the fifth century, certain exegetes made a great effort to render “the impossible” at least a little bit possible. In Tractatus de divitiis we are told that “camellus” means not only a “camel” but also a rope similar to that used by sailors. In other words, there would be the possibility that a camel could pass through the eye of a needle (Eliade 1989).

Such an exegetical tradition must have been alive in the Polish Middle Ages: two meanings of “camellus” are mentioned in the Dictionary of Medieval Latin in Poland: “wielbła˛d” [camel] and “lina”, “sznur” [rope] (Plezia: 1965). It seems that such an interpretation was an original idea of medieval exegetes. According to Eliade this is an excellent example of what can come from the rationalisation of an image or a symbol. One begins by taking the image ad litteram – then one makes an effort to show that, ultimately, it’s not so absurd as it seems at first glance. An image seems absurd when one takes it in the literal sense. The camel that passes through the eye of a needle should not constitute an impossibility for the one who believes that ‘all things are possible with God’ (Mk 10:27 and 14:36), and that ‘what is impossible with men is possible with God’ (Lk. 18:27) (Eliade: 1989).

It is difficult to decide from where Otwinowski took this medieval, Catholic exegetical idea and why he used it in his poem. If it was taken from Wujek’s commentary on his translation of the New Testament, published six years before the publication of Otwinowski’s Parables, this would be a very unusual example of Jesuit influence on an antitrinitarian text. However, one should remember that even commentaries on the Brest Bible were full of similar medieval exegetical ideas. The Protestants did not completely reject even these controversial exegetical notions, which had been popular in Europe for generations. As Maria Kossowska has observed:

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The commentary to the Brest Bible shows two contradictory approaches to its role in the text. A large part of it is a result of a scientific, critical position, characteristic of scholars of this period. However, it intertwines on an unbelievably large scale with a medieval approach, inclined to interpret everything in an allegorical way (Kossowska: 1968).

Did Otwinowski have the intention of “rationalising” a biblical image, in the manner suggested by Eliade? Such an approach would be consistent with an antitrinitarian method of biblical exegesis. However, there is not enough evidence to interpret both these poems in this way, especially because in one of them a camel and a ship rope are used as equally acceptable images. In fact, these poems make our attempt to identify the translation used by Otwinowski even more difficult. In another poem entitled Zbroja duchowa [Spiritual Armour] there are a few words and phrases referring to the armour of a Christian soldier. Three of these were taken directly from Ephesians: pancerz sprawiedliwos´ci [the breastplate of righteousness] (Eph. 6:14), tarcza wiary [the shield of faith] (Eph. 6:16) and hełm zbawienia [the helmet of salvation] (Eph. 6:17). The first two are rendered in the same way both in the Brest Bible and in the two translations by Czechowic. The third one is rendered in a different way in Czechowic’s second translation – the Polish synonym “przyłbica” is used instead of “hełm” [helmet]. Another poem, Kubek pic´ [To Drink a Cup], may point to one of Czechowic’s translations, and not the Brest Bible, as its biblical source. The poem refers to the passage from Matthew 20:20–23 concerning the request of the mother of Zebedee. In the translation of verses 22 and 23, Czechowic’s antitrinitarian version has in both editions “kubek” (as a translation of “pot¶qiºm”, a cup). “Kubek” is not typical for antitrinitarian biblical language and in this particular case Czechowic is undoubtedly the source, since “pot¶qiºm” is (along with a number of other biblical words) rendered by him consistently in a different manner from contemporary Catholic and Protestant translations, that is, as “kubek” and not as the more typical ecclesiastical equivalent “kielich”. In Polish the word “kielich” [chalice] is used in liturgical language when the Mass and Eucharist are discussed; kubek has a more neutral and general meaning and would never be used in connection with the Roman Catholic liturgy. Finally, there are four examples presenting clear evidence of the Brest Bible as Otwinowski’s source. The first is a poem entitled Szczyros´c´ [Sincerity] in which the key word from 1 Peter 2:2 (“As newborn babes, long for the sincere [pure] milk of the word”) is translated by Otwinowski as “szczyry” [sincere] following the Brest Bible, but by Czechowic as “roztropny” [prudent]. In the second poem, entitled Paz´dziorko [A Mote], the word “bierzmo” [beam] (doj¹m) is rendered exactly as in the Brest Bible. By contrast, Czechowic uses a rare Polish equivalent: “tram”. In the third poem, Grjb pobielany [A Whited Sepulchre], Otwinowski

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uses a phrase popular both in Catholic translations and the Brest Bible, while Czechowic translates t²voir jejomial´moir as “groby potynkowane” [plastered sepulchers]. In the fourth example the word “Raca” (Uaj²), which according to Jesus (Matt. 5:22) should not be used against your brother, is rendered by Otwinowski and the Brest Bible as “Racha” but by Czechowic as “Raka”. There are enough examples to infer that, during his work on biblical poems based on the New Testament, the antitrinitarian author used mainly a translation which was published and recommended in his own community ; but at the same time he did not shy away from using the Brest Bible, the canonical version in the Reformed Church, to which the writer himself belonged until about 1570. However, and this is the most interesting issue, it is highly probable that the writer also used other versions, including Wujek’s New Testament. The hypothesis about translating j²lgkom as “rope” is mentioned in notes in other contemporary Protestant Bible translations, including, for example, the Geneva Bible: “Theophylact noteth, that by this word is meant a cable rope, but Caninius allegeth out of the Talmud that it is a proverb, and the word Camel, signifieth the beast itself”. However, in Poland such an interpretation could only be found at this time in Wujek’s New Testament. This version was well-known to Otwinowski, because his friend Marcin Czechowic, translator of the New Testament, was engaged in extensive polemic with Wujek (Czechowic: 1594).

3.2.3.4 Conclusion In conclusion it can be said that Otwinowski used in his biblical poetry the Old Testament translation of the Brest Bible. Although there were many fundamental doctrinal differences between Reformed Protestants and the antitrinitarians, the Brest Bible was still the only translation of the Old Testament available for the latter in Little Poland. Paradoxically, the Reformed translation was more acceptable than the antitrinitarian translation authored by Szymon Budny, whose theological views made his translation unacceptable even to most antitrinitarians, despite the fact that he was undoubtedly the finest biblical scholar among them. As far as the New Testament is concerned, Otwinowski used both the Brest Bible and (more often) the first edition of the translation by Marcin Czechowic. This may also mean that The Parables of Our Lord Jesus Christ, published in 1599, was written between 1577 and 1594, that is, between the publication of the first (1577) and the second edition (1594) of Czechowic’s New Testament. For scholars of the Polish Reformation the above-mentioned examples may imply that the Brest Bible was not only widely used by orthodox Protestants (Reformed and Lutherans) but also by antitrinitarians, notwithstanding that both the doctrine and new Bible translations of the latter were in

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strong opposition to both Roman Catholic and mainstream Protestant theology and exegesis.

NOTE Polish translations of the Bible were quoted from the following editions: [J. Wujek, trsl.], Nowy Testament Pana naszego Jezusa Chrystusa. Znowu z łacin´skiego i z greckiego na polskie wiernie a szczerze przełoz˙ony […] Przez D. Jakuba Wujka, Teologa Societatis Iesu (Krakjw, 1593; modern reprint: Krakjw, 1966); [M. Czechowic, trsl.], Nowy Testament. To jest wszytkie pisma Nowego Przymierza z greckiego je˛zyka na rzecz polska˛ wiernie i szczerze przełoz˙one (Krakjw, 1577); new edn: Nowy Testament. To jest wszytkie pisma Nowego Przymierza z greckiego je˛zyka na rzecz polska˛ wiernie i szczyrze przełoz˙one (Krakjw 1594). Otwinowski’s works were quoted according to the critical edition: E. Otwinowski, Pisma poetyckie, ed. P. Wilczek (Warszawa: Instytut Badan´ Literackich PAN, 1999).

3.3

Conversion and Transformation: a Few Remarks on the Lives and Works of Polish Writers of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation

3.3.1 Conversions – an Introduction In Christianity […] conversion is a biblical notion referring to a radical change of life – mind and action (metanoia) under the influence of accepting the Word of God. According to the Bible a convert seeks the source of his potential in God; he lives according to the principles of the Decalogue; his life is governed by the fear of God, by faith, hope, justice and love (both of God and neighbour). Theologians emphasise that conversion is not a single act, but an ongoing process bound up with an existential effort (Nawrjcenie: 2001).

Conversion stands either for transformation as such or, more broadly, transformation through a change of denomination. From the theological standpoint, it does not only denote communion with God, but also a shift of mentality and practice. In the Christian tradition the rapid transformation of Saul through sanctifying grace represents a model conversion. The New Testament puts forward a formulation of transformation (Mt 18,3; 1 P 2,25; Mk 1,15). Only recently has the Catholic Church narrowed down the semantic scope of the notion

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of conversion to the conversion into Catholicism (…). Social sciences are not unanimous about the definition. In order to reach a consensus, sociologists limit their definition by assuming that conversion denotes change. The change is understood in different ways and can mean: 1) a turn from unbelief to faith; 2) a turn from one denomination to another ; 3) a religious turn in the believer’s life (spiritual transformation within a Church) (Libiszowska-Z˙jłtkowska: 2001).

With regard to the issues debated in 16th- and 17th-century literature, this essay ventures to discuss the second definition (transition from one denomination to another) and the third (a religious turn in the believer’s life). These two kinds of conversion were in many cases interrelated, for example, when the change of denomination was inspired by a spiritual epiphany. In this chapter religious conversion is discussed only in relation to Polish Renaissance and Baroque poetry, without wider discussion of this complex issue, so fundamental for the early modern era (cf. Mahlmann-Bauer : 2013). In European Christian culture, The Confessions of St. Augustine for centuries set the pattern for exemplary spiritual conversion. The three parts of the text exemplify how a Christian conversion is a turn from oneself to God. Augustine revealed the essence of conversion in book IV, where he writes The only good we can know rests in You. When we turn from the good, You push us aside until we return. Oh, Lord, turn us, lest we be overturned. Be the good in us that is not corrupted. You are our incorruptible good. In You we do not fear that there will be no home to return to if we wander off. While we are away, You preserve our mansion with a patience that stretches into eternity.

The Latin version is as follows: Vivit apud te semper bonum nostrum, et quia inde aversi sumus, perversi sumus. Revertamur iam, domine, ut non evertamur, quia vivit apud te sine ullo defectu bonum nostrum, quo tu ipse es, et non timemus ne non sit quo redeamus, quia nos inde ruimus. Nobis autem absentibus non ruit domus nostra, aeternitas sua) (cf. Kijewska: 2006).

The Protestant Reformation breathed new life into the idea of conversion. The reformers embodied a distinctive combination: first, conversion as a spiritual transformation, and second, conversion as a transition from one denomination to another. It is worth noting that the first reformers, Luther in particular, had no intention of creating a new faith or a new church, but the social and political situation favoured the appeal for conversion (including conversion within Christianity), which in turn encouraged the emergence of new churches. Subsequent change of denomination resulted in the strengthening of the faith of those whose religious shift was influenced by various internal as well as external factors. Numerous publications and articles have discussed these issues. It is by no

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means my intention to provide yet another encyclopaedia entry on the notion of conversion in light of the European Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Moreover, “the new model of a converted poet” has been debated many times, such as in the article on Torquato Tasso by Janusz Pelc. He described the phenomenon of conversion as a new code of conduct among the writers living at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. In this spiritually turbulent period an individual was compelled – often for political reasons – to champion a given cause. Pelc wrote: It must be noted that religious fanaticism, both among the followers of new denominations and Catholics involved in the Tridentine renewal, coexisted with genuine religious devotion, earnest moral revival through the renunciation of sins, especially harlotry and prurience – both in life and art. As a result of these influences, acts of conversion were performed not only through the change of denomination, but also – perhaps even more likely – by remaining faithful to one’s Church. In such a case, conversion consisted in the rejection of sin understood as unashamed eroticism, in its ‘shameless charm’ (‘procax venustas’), as lustfulness, and in the destruction of immodest paintings and sculptures (Pelc: 1998).

My intent is to illustrate briefly how conversion became a fundamental category which can be used to demonstrate the literary and life attitudes of six Polish writers, active from the late 16th until the second half of the 17th century : Jan Kochanowski, Mikołaj Se˛p Szarzyn´ski, Erazm Otwinowski, Kasper Wilkowski, Kasper Twardowski, and Wacław Potocki.

3.3.2 Jan Kochanowski Although the most prominent poet of the Polish Renaissance, Jan Kochanowski, is scarcely associated with the problem of conversion, there are good reasons why the poet’s life and works should serve as a most interesting case study for the purposes in question. Although it still remains uncertain – despite considerable scholarly research – whether the poet actually adopted Lutheranism, this hypothesis is not unreasonable. Scholars have argued that the absence of Christ, the Mother of God and veneration of saints in Kochanowski’s religious poetry testifies to the poet’s Protestant sentiments. To prove the point, some have even mentioned his anticlerical elegies in Latin, which, however, can hardly serve as evidence of the poet’s alleged conversion. Wiktor Weintraub claimed that Kochanowski’s religious attitude coincided with the “theistic religious universalism of Italian humanists (Weintraub: 1977) and Jan Błon´ski proposed similar suggestions (Błon´ski: 1996). I discuss these matters in more detail in an essay entitled Jan Kochanowski’s religion: Protestant? Erasmian? Catholic?, published in this book. The poet’s conversion, conceived as a shift from humanist piety,

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combined with elements of stoicism and Epicureanism, to traditional Catholic devotion, was expressed especially in the last three poems in the series of Laments written after the death of his beloved daughter, Orszula. Laments are indeed poems of conversion, although Lament XIX was sometimes perceived as a return to his former humanistic world view. Even so, Kochanowski’s Laments are the most prominent example of spiritual transformation in Polish literature.

3.3.3 Mikołaj Se˛ p Szarzyn´ski and Erazm Otwinowski Mikołaj Se˛p Szarzyn´ski, a poet of the late Renaissance or – as proposed by some – early Baroque period, embodies a classic instance of a poet convert for two reasons. First, it is believed – although there is no textual evidence – that Se˛p Szarzyn´ski’s alleged turn from Lutheranism to Catholicism was inspired by the example of conversions within the influential aristocratic family of Kostka, promoting Catholic renewal in the eastern part of Poland (cf. Gruchała: 1997). Second, even if one repudiates this assumption concerning his change of denomination (cf. Borowski: 1983), Se˛p’s oeuvre will remain a fascinating instance of religious poetry presenting the inner conversion of a man who in his sonnets “with tears, youthful faults [he] rues”, expressing an inner conflict between spiritual and corporeal needs. Should these “youthful faults” be taken for a Lutheran past? Should we attribute the words to the series of erotic poems found years later in manuscripts ascribed to Se˛p? Or should we accept – the most obvious conjecture – that what is at stake is nothing more than youthful sprees and revels? Whatever the answer, this dominant portion of Se˛p Szarzyn´ski’s works remains undeniably a model of Polish Renaissance literature, presenting as its protagonist a converted man going through religious transformation brought about by a spiritual turning point. Hence, Se˛p’s most likely patron remains St. Augustine, and the poet’s dramatic spiritual dilemmas, anchored in the ongoing spiritual conflict of a believer, take on a universal dimension. Regarded as the chief poet of the Church of the Polish Brethren, Erazm Otwinowski has become the prime model for this kind of conversion. But the main reason behind this assumption is dubious: anonymous erotic poems were attributed – most probably erroneously – to him, largely because they were preserved in a manuscript codex which also contained poems ascribed to Se˛p Szarzyn´ski. A series of love poems from the same codex, whose author – as can be inferred from the textual analysis – was undoubtedly a Protestant, was ascribed to Otwinowski, a Calvinist in his youth, who then turned to antitrinitarianism, and became a preacher of strict biblical piety. We are again dealing with a peculiar phenomenon – an author of love poems and a Calvinist turns into an author of religious poems inspired by the Bible after

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he had converted to antitrinitarianism – a denomination that is much more radical than the Calvinism from which antitrinitarianism emerged. Taking into account all possible differences, these circumstances are still much on a par with Se˛p’s, although Se˛p’s circumstances, too, have been entirely made up by literary historians. In all probability, Se˛p might have been neither a Lutheran, nor the author of the love poems. Seen through the lens of historical and literary criticism, the external circumstances (the faith and authorship of the texts) became a sort of external justification for the inner transformation revealed in his poetry, namely in the series Polish Rhythms or Poems (Rytmy abo Wiersze polskie), unquestionably authored by Se˛p. Such was also the case with Otwinowski, a proponent of the new, radical faith. Otwinowski, like Se˛p, was believed by critics to have written erotic poems. In fact he never did. Ascribing love and even sometimes erotic poems so much at odds with Otwinowski’s subsequent religious poetry gives the story of conversion more credibility, since in Christian literature – despite the distinct convention of mystical love poetry – eroticism was at variance with religious piety. Hence, repudiation of the erotic in literature, as argued above by Pelc, has been taken as a token of conversion.

3.3.4 Kasper Twardowski Conversion as spiritual transformation that underscores the discrepancy between religion and eroticism is best epitomised in the oeuvre of Kasper Twardowski. His early work, Cupid’s Lessons (Lekcje Kupidynowe), is an allegorical love poem. Innocent as the title may sound these days, in 1617 it was catalogued in The Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books). Influenced by men of the cloth, seriously ill and, as a result, spiritually transformed, Twardowski assumed that “one’s penance should be measured according to the deed he sinned by”. Hence – as the critic Czesław Hernas would have it – “[one should] repent the sins of poetry in poetry”. The Cracow Congregation of the Assumption of Mary, which he joined, helped him make this decision and his subsequent poem, Łjdz´ młodzi z nawałnos´ci do brzegu płyna˛ca (The Boat of Youth Sailing Ashore from Tempestuousness), became the first token of his remorse, “negating evil writings by means of good ones”. Hernas goes on to say that “the poet did not turn away from the means of expression symptomatic of an erotic discourse, but subordinated them to other functions”. Twardowski’s third work that shows spiritual transformation is the poem Pochodnia Miłos´ci Boz˙ej z pia˛cia˛ strzał ognistych (The Torch of Divine Love with Five Burning Arrows). The three poems constitute a reinforcing complementary series: the first one dramatises earthly love, the second one – after the sparring victory of God’s

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Amor over Cupid – indicates the dimensions of internal transformation; it was a poem on the drama of conversion. The final one, which aims to bring consolation, discusses the philosophy of God’s love (Hernas: 1998, 56–64).

3.3.5 Wacław Potocki Wacław Potocki is another interesting instance of a Baroque poet convert. His conversion to Catholicism allegedly was not as much brought about by a spiritual turn, as by an act of parliament, widely commented on in history textbooks. Promulgated in 1658, this act ordered the Polish Brethren either to convert to Catholicism or leave the country. The order directly affected Wacław Potocki, who decided to convert to Catholicism and remain on his native soil, although he was an author of antitrinitarian religious poems. It is now difficult to analyse his attitude and motives in depth. Then he was considered opportunistic by many. Emigration was not, however, a way out for the poet. He was not the most outstanding member of the Church of the Polish Brethren. He refused to engage in disputes on doctrine. Significantly enough, his wife did not abandon Socinianism, and this worked to the detriment of his family. Potocki renounced the antitrinitarian faith as a mature, forty-year-old man. All he yearned for, it seems, was the tranquil existence of a country gentleman. Hence, the community oriented model of Catholicism proved attractive for Potocki. In his antitrinitarian works, a return to the sources, e. g. to the Bible, was evident. Indeed, they can be read as an instance of poetic biblical hermeneutics, and not necessarily as a poetic illustration of doctrine. The topos miles Christianus is developed in biblical, rather than Erasmian, terms. It is difficult to judge to what extent the conversion to Catholicism meant a genuine spiritual transformation, or for that matter to establish whether he was an ardent Socinian before his conversion. In the past he has been presented as an antitrinitarian poet. We are more cautious now, as the nature of his works was manifestly Catholic (his pro-Church declarations, Marian devotions and veneration of saints all testify to this). Perhaps the doctrinal differences were not so important to him. If we agree with Janusz Pelc that the general features of Socinian poetry are the inclusion of ethical issues and the bringing forth of the intellectual facets of poetry, along with a profound knowledge of the Bible, it may be assumed Potocki was always affiliated with antitrinitarianism. Unlike Erazm Otwinowski he had never been, however, a poet of his Church community. The Bible was crucial for him. As a result of his antitrinitarian upbringing he ranked it higher than the ancient classics. By the same token, the Bible would remain as more important than the ecclesiastical tradition. Undoubtedly his adoration of the works of Erasmus of Rotterdam up until the publication of Moralia stemmed from the Socinian period, but this does

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not prove him antitrinitarian. His antitrinitarian origins can be most detected in his exhortations for tolerance towards other faiths. In sum, it may be difficult to determine what sort of religious sentiments are expressed in the works of Potocki. It cannot be conclusively determined that Potocki promoted antitrinitarianism in his works published after 1658; even before his conversion he was more of a biblical than radical Reformation poet.

3.3.6 Kasper Wilkowski An earlier striking example of conversion from antitrinitarianism to Catholicism was illustrated in Kasper Wilkowski’s book Przyczyny nawrjcenia do wiary powszechnej od sekt nowokrzczen´cjw samosaten´skich (The Causes of Conversion to the Universal Faith from the Samosatene Anabaptist Sects). Wilkowski, a physician from Lublin, gives a dramatic account of his conversion, characterising his decision as a betrayal of his own father, who, as an antitrinitarian, would never forgive his son his dissent. This case study demonstrates how much had changed within the century – from highly intense accounts of conversion of the late 16th century, by individuals troubled over spiritual dilemmas in pursuit of truth (Wilkowski, whom I have just mentioned, or Se˛p Szarzyn´ski), to Potocki, whose conversion a hundred years later occurred against the backdrop of the triumph of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Individual dramas no longer mattered as much. Instead, the pattern of a religiously homogenous community was stressed. A change of religion no longer necessarily epitomised a radical change, but was inscribed in a particular lifestyle.

3.3.7 Conclusion These examples demonstrate how difficult and complicated the problem of conversion in early Poland was. For people of that time religion served as an obvious point of reference for all existential issues. Conversion did not always necessitate a change of denomination, and the latter did not necessarily entail a spiritual turn. Nor did conversion to Catholicism always result from external imperatives – even in such conspicuous cases as that of Wacław Potocki – but rather became intertwined with complicated spiritual processes. The dynamic should never be underestimated and reduced to the Reformation – CounterReformation clash. The 16th- and 17th-century accounts of conversion serve to exemplify spiritual and existential transformations, which – setting aside simple parallels – mirror our contemporary spiritual renewals. As Janusz Pelc stated, “[t]o be a heretic in the Europe of that time, indeed, not

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only a heretic, but also an outsider, standing out from the crowd in terms of religion or beliefs, simply did not pay”. And Professor Pelc then asks us – as do I – “Well, was it the case only at that time?” (Pelc: 1998). I believe that this question serves also as an excellent conclusion to this book.

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Original Publications

139

WRZECIONKO, PAUL (1963), Die Theologie des Rakower Katechismus. Kirche in Osten, Studien zur osteuropaischen Kirchengeschichte und Kirchenkunde. Vol. 6, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. WUJEK, JAKUB (1593) (transl.), Nowy Testament Pana naszego Jezusa Chrystusa. Znowu z łacin´skiego i z greckiego na polskie wiernie a szczerze przełoz˙ony […] Przez D. Jakuba Wujka, Teologa Societatis Iesu, Krakjw : Piotrkowczyk. WYROBISZ, ANDRZEJ (1992), Staropolskie wzorce rodziny i kobiety – z˙ony i matki, Przegla˛d Historyczny, vol. 3.

Original Publications Most chapters of this book were presented as public lectures or conference papers and previously published in scholarly journals or volumes of conference proceedings. They have been revised, corrected and updated to match with the idea of the book as a comprehensive survey of selected, major topics of the Polish Reformation and Counter-Reformation. 2.1 Religion on the Periphery – the Polish Case – unpublished 2.2 The Polish Reception of John Calvin’s Works in the Context of the History of Christianity in Poland – a chapter published in: Herman J. Selderhuis and Arnold Huijgen (ed.), Calvinus Pastor Ecclesiae. Papers of the Eleventh International Congress on Calvin Research. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016, based on a plenary lecture “John Calvin in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – a Paradoxical Presence” delivered at the Eleventh International Congress of Calvin Research at the Institut für Schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte, Universität Zürich on 27 August 2014. 2.3 The Myth of the Polish Reformation: Socinianism in Modern Historiography – a chapter published in: Peter Opitz (ed.), The Myth of the Reformation, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013, p. 59–70, and based on a plenary lecture presented at the First RefoRC Conference at the Institut für Schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte, Universität Zürich on 9 June 2011. 2.4 The Major Concepts of Antitrinitarian Theology in the 16th Century – a chapter published in: Piotr Wilczek (ed.), The Reformation in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth and its European Contexts. Research Proposals. Warszawa: Sub Lupa, 2010, p. 167–181, based on an invited lecture “Polish Calvinism in Crisis: the Emergence of the Antitrinitarian Theology in the 16th Century”

140

Bibliography

delivered at The Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies (Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI) on 10 November 2009. 2.5 Rakjw – the Capital of Socinianism: A Unique Case of European Religious Topography in the Age of the Reformation – unpublished 2.6 Liber Socinianorum primarius: Introductory Remarks on the Racovian Catechism – unpublished 2.7 Debates between Jesuits and “Heretics” in Early Modern Polish Literature – an extended version of an article: Catholics and Heretics: Some Aspects of Religious Debates in the Old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. “The Sarmatian Review”. Vol. 2 (1999), p. 619–628. 3.1 Jan Kochanowski and Polish Confessional Dilemmas in the Mid-16th Century – the chapter is based on my following publications: Literatura polskiego renesansu, Katowice: University of Silesia Press, 2005; “W co wierzył Jan Kochanowski? Głos w sporze o religijnos´c´ poety i jego poezji” in: Polonice et Latine. Studia o literaturze staropolskiej. Katowice: University of Silesia Press, 2007, p. 125–136; Jan Kochanowski, Katowice: Nomen-Omen, 2011. 3.2 Erazm Otwinowski – a Biblical Poet – updated and revised versions of my following publications: Erazm Otwinowski – pisarz arian´ski, Katowice: Gnome, 1994; “Wprowadzenie”, in: Erazm Otwinowski, Pisma poetyckie. Warszawa: IBL PAN, 1999; “The Brest Bible and other Polish translations of the Bible in the poetical works of Erazm Otwinowski”. Reformation and Renaissance Review. Vol. 17. No. 1. April 2015, p. 73–81. 3.3 Conversion and Transformation: a Few Remarks on the Lives and Works of Polish Writers of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation – the chapter is based on an article entitled Conversions and Transformations in the Lives and Works of Polish Baroque Poets, in: Piotr Salwa (ed.), Polish Baroque, European Contexts. Warsaw : University of Warsaw Press, 2012, p. 153–160.

Index of Persons (This Index does not include Acknowledgements, Contents, Bibliography and Original Publications)

Agrippa von Nettesheim, Heinrich Cornelius 107 Albrecht von Hohenzollern 28, 93, 98 f. Alciati, Andrea 95 Alegambe, Philippo 79 Alstedt, Johann Heinrich 66 Anacreon 95 Aristotle 96 Atkinson, James 80, 82 Augustine of Hippo 122, 124 Awianowicz, Bartosz 99 Bainton, Roland 82 Bal#zs, Mih#ly 12, 74 Balduin, Friedrich 69 Baran´czak, Stanislaw 97 Bartel, Oskar 24 Bazylik, Cyprian 108 f. Benzing, Josef 80 Beresford, James Kidd 90 Biandrata, Giorgio 24, 26, 28, 39, 50 f., 74 Biddle, John 66, 70 Błon´ski, Jan 101 f., 123 Bolsec, J8rime-HermHs 30 Borowski, Andrzej 6, 124 Bucer, Martin 61 Budny, Szymon 45, 76, 113 f., 116 f., 120 Bullinger, Heinrich 61, 86 Burton, Simon 12 f., 56 Calissius, Wojciech 75 Calvin, John 22–35, 39, 53, 61, 74, 90, 105 Cameron, Euan 37

Campion, Edmund 30 Camporeale, Salvatore I. 102 Castellio, Sebastian 30 Cecilia Vasa, Princess of Sweden 104 f. Charles IX, King of France 94 Chmaj, Ludwik 41, 43, 49, 85 Chrisman, Miriam U. 74 Chudzik, Wanda 18 Chwalba, Andrzej 19 Cole, Richard G. 73 Conradt, Nancy M. 24 Copernicus, Nicholas 104 Cornelius, Ioannes (Cornelisz Knoll, Jan) 66 Cottret, Bernard 34, 67 Crell, Johann (Crellius, Johannes) 39, 59, 67, 104 Crespin, Jean 108 f. Cromwell, Oliver 71 Crusius, Florianus 67 Cynarski, Stanisław 58 Czapska, Maria 73 Czartoryski, Jerzy 21 Czechowic, Marcin 47 f., 51–54, 69, 76– 79, 107, 111, 113–117, 119–121 Czerniawski, Adam 95, 97 David, Franciscus 50 f., 113, 116 Davies, Norman 11, 15–18 Delumeau, Jean 96 Desportes, Philippe 94 Dudith, Andreas 47, 109 Dugard, William 66

142

Index of Persons

Dziechcin´ska, Hanna 110 Dzierzgowski, Nicholas 30 Eck, Johann 25, 86 Eliade, Mircea 118 f. Erasmus, Desiderius 41, 48–50, 73, 95, 101–104, 114, 126 Estienne, Robert 48, 114 Euripides 96 Faunt, Arthur 30 Ferguson, Niall 19 f., 23 Ficino, Marsilio 101 f. Fonseca, Damiano 21 Foxe, John 39 Freud, Sigmund 82 Frick, David A. 11, 74, 113, 116 f. Friedrich, Karin 11, 61 Friedrich III, Kurfürst von der Pfalz Frost, Robert 11, 56

61

Giese, Tiedemann 104 Gilowski, Paweł 54 Glaber, Andrzej 107 Gliczner, Erazm 107 Głowa, Stanisław 87 Gnoin´ska, Jadwiga 56 Gordon, Bruce 34 Gjrnicki, Łukasz 110 Gjrski, Konrad 41, 50 Gostomski, Anzelm 107 Grabowski, Tadeusz 32 Graciotti, Sante 100 Greef, Wulfert De 25, 39 Green, Ian 60 Greenslade, Stanley Lawrence 90 Gregorius Paulus of Brzeziny 26, 28, 30, 41, 50 Grodzicki, Stanisław 30 Gruchała, Janusz S. 124 Grzeszczuk, Stanisław 100 Halecki, Oskar 22 Heaney, Seamus 97 Henri de Valois, King of Poland Hernas, Czesław 125 f.

94

Hillar, Marian 13, 51 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) Hotson, Howard 11 Huber, Steffen 103 Huizinga, Johan 101

95

James I, King of England 46, 69 f. Janicki, Marek 97 Januszowski, Jan 94, 97 Jaskjła, Piotr 32 f. Jensen, De Lamar 37 Jobert, Ambroise 72 John Paul II 17 Jones, Ernest 82 Kamieniecki, Jan 45 Karsai, Gyorgy 42 Kawecka-Gryczowa, Alodia 41, 58, 64, 116 Keane, Barry 97 f. Kidd, Beresford J. 90 Kijewska, Agnieszka 122 Kłoczowski, Jerzy 13, 22, 72 Kmita, Piotr 104 Knijjff, Philip 64 Kochanowska, Orszula 94, 96 f., 124 Kochanowski, Jan 14 f., 93–103, 105, 109 f., 123 f. Kochowski, Wespazjan 97–99 Köhler, Hans Joachim 74 Kołakowski, Leszek 102 Korzo, Margarita A. 27 f. Kossowska, Maria 118 f. Kot, Stanisław 12 f., 26, 39, 41, 43, 55, 71, 75, 99, 106, 116 Krain´ski, Krzysztof 107 Krzyz˙anowski, Julian 98 Kuchowicz, Zbigniew 107 Kwiatkiewicz, Jan 30 Łaski, Jan (John a Lasco) 24, 26 f., 39, 74 Lasocina, Anna 107 Łaszcz, Marcin 30, 75–81, 83, 116 f. Lau, Franz 82 Lausberg, Heinrich 79 Leszczyn´ski, Rafał 33

143

Index of Persons

Libiszowska-Z˙jłtkowska, Maria 122 Lipska, Ewa 35 f. Lismanino, Francesco 25 Louthan, Howard 12 f. Loyola, Ignatius 101 Lubieniecki, Krzysztof 53, 111 Lubieniecki, Stanislas (Stanisław) 14, 36 f., 45, 60, 105 f. Luther, Martin 25, 30, 61, 73, 79–84, 86, 90, 93, 122 Maciuszko, Janusz 21 Mahlmann-Bauer, Barbara 122 Małłek, Janusz 99 Markus, Mihaly 24 Martial (Marcus Valerius Martialis) 95 Marx, Karl 34 McDonald, Grantley R. 50 McGrath, Alister E. 34, 86 Melanchthon, Philipp 73, 103 f. Micewski, Andrzej 18 Mikos, Michael J. 95, 97 Miller, James 45 Milton, John 71 Mincer, Wiesław 23, 34 Misiurek, Jerzy 44, 47, 74, 104 Modrzewski, Andrzej Frycz 25, 103 Moone, Richard 66 Morsztyn, Zbigniew 110 Mortimer, Sarah 45 Moskorzowski, Hieronim 58 f., 65, 69, 84 f., 87 f., 90 Mrowin´ski Płoczywłos, Jan 107 Murdock, Graeme 12 Myszkowski, Piotr 94, 97 Naton´ski, Bronisław 76 Niemojewski, Jan 49, 51–54, 69, 106, 111 Nola, Alfonso M. Di 82 Nowakowska, Natalia 11 Oberman, Heiko 82 f. Obirek, Stanisław 6, 89 Oeder, Georg Christian 63 Oeder, Georg Ludwig 58, 62 f., 67, 71

Ogonowski, Zbigniew 42–45, 70, 88, 104, 109 Olevianus, Caspar 61 O’Sullivan, John 17 Otwinowski, Erazm 14, 45 f., 103–113, 115–121, 123–126 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 95 Ozment, Steven 73 f. Padniewski, Filip 94 Paleologus, Jacobus 51, 109 Pasierbin´ski, Tadeusz 85 Pease, Nigel 22 Pelc, Janusz 98, 110, 123, 125–128 Pelikan, Jaroslav 26, 50, 75 Petrarca, Francesco 95 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 101 Piechowski, Jerzy 34 Piotr z Gonia˛dza 53 Pirie, Donald 110, 113 Piwko, Stanisław 33 Plezia, Marian 118 Podlodowska, Dorota 94 Pollard, Albert F. 11, 37–39 Potocki, Wacław 123, 126 f. Powodowski, Hieronim 47, 77, 106, 114 Prall Radin, Dorothea 97 Propertius (Sextus Propertius) 95 Przewodowski, Hieronim 30 Przypkowski, Samuel 39, 66, 69 Ptaszyn´ski, Maciej 12 Radecke, Matthäus 54 Radon´, Sławomir 44, 74, 77, 79 Radziwiłł, Nicholas 28, 94 Raina, Peter 18 Reczka, Krzysztof 18 Rees, Thomas 68, 70 Reiter, Paul 82 Rej, Mikołaj 32, 100, 105, 107 Richgels, Robert W. 75 Rodecki, Aleksy 58 Ronenberg, Szymon 57 Ronsard, Pierre 94 Ruar, Martin 59

144 Sabellicus, Marcus Antonius Coccius 108 f. Salatowsky, Sascha 59 Sandius, Christophorus 64 Sarbiewski, Maciej Kazimierz 98, 103 Sarnicki, Stanisław 50 Saxl, Fritz 72 f. Scaliger, Julius Caesar 96 Schlichting (Schlichtingius), Jonas 67 Schmalz, Valentin (Szmalc, Walenty) 53, 58 f., 63–65, 69, 111 Schmeisser, Martin 63–65, 68, 70 Schmidt, Johann Adam 67 Schoman, Jerzy 64 Seidel, Martin 109 Seneca (Lucius Annaeus Seneca Minor) 96 Se˛p Szarzyn´ski, Mikołaj 99, 101, 123 f., 127 Servet(us), Miguel 34, 39 Sienien´ski, Jakub 57 Sienien´ski, Jan 56 f. Sigismundus Augustus, King of Poland 22, 24 f. Sigismundus the Old, King of Poland 25 Sipayłło, Maria 115 Skarga, Piotr 21, 76, 84–89 Słowacki, Juliusz 16 S´miglecki, Marcin 76, 85 Sobiekrajski, Szymon A. 16 Socinus, Faustus (Sozzini, Fausto) 36, 39– 41, 46–49, 51–55, 57 f., 69, 74, 84 f., 90, 93, 104, 109, 111, 114 Sowa, Jan 19 f. Stancaro, Francesco 26, 30 Statorius, Pierre (Petrus) 47, 49, 58, 65, 69, 75, 114 Stec, Wiesław 74 Stefan Batory (Istv#n B#thory), King of Poland 94, 105 Stegmann, Joachim 39, 59, 67, 69, 88 Sternacki, Paweł 58 Sternacki, Sebastian 58 Sykes, Norman 90

Index of Persons

Sylvius, Jacob 26 Szczucki, Lech 44, 77, 116 Tarnowski, Jan 25 Tasso, Torquato 123 Tazbir, Janusz 12 f., 43–45, 55, 60, 72, 74, 79, 84, 89 Te˛czyn´ski, Stanisław 104 f. Tibullus (Albius Tibullus) 95 Todd, James 82 Tokarczyk, Andrzej 34 Trissino, Gian Giorgio 96 Trzecieski, Andrzej 99 Twardowski, Kasper 123, 125 Tworek, Michael 12 Tworek, Stanisław 56 f. Tync, Stanisław 58 f. Uchan´ski, Jakub 25 f., 103 Urban, Wacław 22, 27, 41, 56 f., 59 f., 85, 100 Veedemond, Hieronymus 67 Viser, Sibbe Jan 64 Völkel, Johannes 58 f., 65, 69 Wagner-Rundell, Benedict 11 Weber, Max 20 We˛gierski, Andrzej 106 Weintraub, Wiktor 98–101, 123 Wetstein, Henricus 64 Wilanowski, Cyprian 18 Wilbur, Earl Morse 13, 59, 62, 68 f. Wilczek, Piotr 12 f., 21, 31, 45, 56, 116, 121, 139 Wiles, Maurice 75 Wilhelm von Rosenberg 105 Wilkowski, Kasper 123, 127 Williams, George H. 24, 26 f., 39, 45, 60, 75, 84, 89 Windakiewicz, Stanisław 98 Wiszowaty, Andrzej (Wissowatius, Andreas) 39, 69, 88, 104 Wiszowaty, Benedykt (Wissowatius, Benedictus) 67 Wolff, Larry 20, 37

145

Index of Persons

Wolzogen, Johann Ludwig 39 Wotschke, Theodor 24 Wrzecionko, Paul 70 Wujek, Jakub 75–77, 116, 118, 120 f. Wyrobisz, Andrzej 107

Z˙ebrowski, Szcze˛sny 76, 116 Zwingli, Huldrich 53, 61