For his dissertation, third-year UoP history student Jacob Canavan chose to focus on Polish Protestantism which, while largely forgotten and repressed at home, proved to have a significant influence abroad, in spreading ideas which were to influence enlightenment thought across Europe. Jacob’s supervisor was Dr Fiona McCall. Jacob has been accepted to continue on to study for a Master’s degree at the University of York, the alma mater of our own Drs Katy Gibbons and Mike Esbester and Professor Dave Andress and a great place to study religious history.
When one thinks about Poland and its history, one rarely conjures the image of a Protestant church, with its pristine white interior, its modest decorations and its quiet gravitas. Yet in Warsaw stands the Lutheran Holy Trinity Church, renowned for its size and its unique round top, resembling a temple rather than a church. Nearby is the Evangelical Reformed Parish of Warsaw, a towering monument to a denomination that once dominated the aristocracy of Poland. In one sense these churches are faithful remnants preserved in all things by the God that they trusted, but in another sense they stand as solemn gravestones of a future that never was.
But what future did the Polish Protestants want? In Poland today, secularism is rapidly growing as the Catholic Church loses its grip on the country. While the Protestant Churches (who only account for 0.4% of the population) seem unlikely to replace it, the ideas of the Polish Protestants and dissenters of the Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries lived on in its influence overseas and has seemingly returned to Poland under the auspices of Western hegemony. While Poland itself rejected them, their ideas were seized upon by foreigners and in many ways constituted the liberal philosophy that dominates the European order today.
When picking a topic for my dissertation I felt myself drawn to a part of history, any part of history, that was shrouded in obscurity. I felt this because history rarely forgets by accident, but always on purpose. I wanted my dissertation to have practical ends, to pick a side in a contemporary debate that I felt I had not only a duty but a personal stake in upholding. As a Protestant, I felt drawn to the Eastern European Reformation, which I had heard about but never in any detail.
I was soon to find out why as I discovered that many Polish historians had sought to extinguish the memory of the Polish Reformation because it conflicted with the intrinsically Catholic identity of Poland that was proliferated during and after the Counter-Reformation. This did initially frustrate my research, but I soon found that there had been a recent resurgence of interest in the Polish Reformation by more sympathetic ears, with some more recent Polish Historians such as Stanislaw Kot writing his books on the Polish Reformation not merely as products of interest but as strikes against Catholic hegemony over Polish national consciousness. More neutral anglophone sources have since been written with less of an eye for ideological motivation, but without initially realising it, I had drawn swords in an ongoing battle for Poland’s religious conscience.
Engraving of Jan Laski, 1572
As my dissertation found in its research, not only did the Polish dissenters influence the foundations of political liberalism, but the Church of England under Henry VIII found one of its stoutest architects in the Pole Jan Laski. Likewise, the Reformed Church in the Netherlands recorded that the Polish Maccovius had “came to their shores from heaven.” Later Dutch theologians like Abraham Kuyper, who was also a Conservative Prime Minister of his country in the very early 1900s, owed his political and theological genesis to Lasco and Maccovius’ writings. Kuyper had a profound influence on Western Conservatism more broadly as his “Neo-Calvinism” filtered into more mainstream political applications of hierarchy and order.
Portrait of Johannes Maccovius by Johannes Pandelius, Museum Martena, The Netherlands
Meanwhile the Socinians, a Polish non-Trinitarian (dissenting) sect, found admirers in men as far afield as John Locke, Pierre Bayle and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Their ideology of religious tolerance, state secularism, and an opposition to miracles in favour of reason made them hugely influential in Enlightenment circles. Their break from mainstream Protestantism in their emancipation of reason from Church authority gave the classical liberals (of all faiths) their springboard from which to develop a comprehensive political application of reason in place of arbitrary authority. Many credited the Polish Socinians as the very seeds of the Enlightenment itself.
When one looks at Poland today as a secularized “Western” state, a core ally of the US and a strict policy of equality before the law, with an increasingly liberal population, it’s difficult not to reconsider these few remaining Polish Protestant churches as prophecies of Poland’s future rather than anything else. While Poland never fell to the Reformation through headcount, the ideologies unleashed by it have returned to dominate from abroad. Polish historians and authors have for centuries tried to depict the Reformation in Poland as foreign and alien to an intrinsically Catholic Polish identity, tacitly referring to it as the “Reformation in Poland” rather than the “Polish Reformation.” These authors have nevertheless failed to extinguish what they couldn’t put out, and their politics today is defined by those who they tried their hardest to forget.
Time ultimately never closes its doors to a movement as long as its animating fire still burns. For centuries some ideologies seclude themselves in hiding, waiting for the proverbial crown to fall into their lap via the natural machinations of History. For this we should seek to study the deposed and the defeated, for the exiles of lost causes will always return in one form or another to haunt their oppressors. No power can sustain itself perpetually, and in time the first will be last and the last will be first. While the Polish Reformation may not have succeeded in converting Poland country to its faith, it has, through its labour in other countries, inadvertently opened up Poland from its Counter-Reformational fortress and opened the gates of the country to tolerance. History makes fools of all kings and sovereignties, and for this I would advise History students to study the seeds of dissent, for it is there that the prophecies of the future can be found. The most important thing however is to pick a topic that is both meaningful to you and to the world more broadly, for History is full of unsolved riddles.
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