CATHOLICISM AND ENLIGHTENMENT IN POLAND-LITHUANIA
Richard Butterwick
Interest in a “Catholic Enlightenment” among Polish ecclesiastical and intellectual historians dates from the Second Vatican Council.1 Research has been concentrated in two main areas. The first encom- passes the reform of the schools and seminaries run by some of the religious orders, and the further development of those reforms under the Commission for National Education after 1773. The second has focused on bishops’ efforts to improve the pastoral care of souls. Signif- icantly fewer historians have examined the religious and confessional aspects of state policy and public discourse. Overall, the attention devoted to the “Catholic Enlightenment” in Poland-Lithuania falls behind that conducted on the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy. The reasons for this gap deserve an excursus, before we survey the field.
1. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: a Confessional Noble Republic
The first point is simply to emphasize the otherness of the past. The Commonwealth of the Two Nations, Polish and Lithuanian (Rzecz- pospolita Obojga Narodów, Polskiego i Litewskiego), was founded in 1569 by the Union of Lublin between the Polish Crown (Corona Regni Poloniæ) and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It was partitioned for the third and final time in 1795. It differed greatly from the inde- pendent Polish and Lithuanian states reborn in 1918, and still more from those that reclaimed their sovereignty in 1989 and 1991.2 On the eve of the First Partition in 1772, the territory of the Commonwealth
1 Georg Schwaiger, “Oświecenie a katolicyzm”, Concilium (1966/67): 373–382. 2 Robert Frost, “Ordering the Kaleidoscope: The Construction of Identities in the Lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since 1569”, in Len Scales and Oli- ver Zimmer (eds.), Power and the Nation in European History (Cambridge: 2005), 212–231. 298 richard butterwick
encompassed most of modern Latvia, almost all of modern Lithuania, all of modern Belarus, half of modern Ukraine, and two thirds of mod- ern Poland. The wider population of about fourteen million included Poles, Ruthenes, Lithuanians, Jews, Germans, Latvians, Armenians, Tatars, and Scots: Catholics, Orthodox, Old Believers, Calvinists, Lutherans, Hasidists, Frankists, and Muslims. Just under half habitu- ally spoke a form of Polish. Just over half were Roman Catholics of the Latin rite, while a further third were, however nominally, Catholics of the Ruthenian rite (which was often called the Uniate Church).3 The Commonwealth was dominated by its nobility (szlachta), which made up about seven per cent of the population.4 Much of the nobles’ economic, social, and cultural hegemony endured the rule of the partitioning monarchies, before being destroyed by Communism in stages between 1918 and 1948. The nobles considered themselves, and themselves alone, to constitute the Polish nation, although many also considered themselves Lithuanians, or took pride in their Ruthenian descent. They spoke (and about half could read) a Latinized form of Polish.5 They commonly referred to the Commonwealth as a whole as “Poland”.6 At the time of the Union of Lublin, a substantial minority of nobles, drawn disproportionately from the elite, had adhered to the reformed confessions, while in the eastern territories many, perhaps most, nobles still adhered to Orthodoxy. The Confederacy of Warsaw, formed by nobles to safeguard the Commonwealth during the first interregnum of 1572–1573, declared that its members, although “dissidentes de reli- gione”, would neither spill blood, nor punish each other by impris- onment, exile, or confiscation of property on account of religion.7
3 Józef Andrzej Gierowski, “Przestrzeń etnograficzno-geograficzna Rzeczypospo- litej Polsko-Litewskiej”, in Stanisław Wilk (ed.), Chrześcijaństwo w dialogu kultur na ziemiach Rzeczypospolitej (Lublin: 2003), 33–52. 4 Emanuel Rostworowski, “Ilu było w Rzeczypospolitej obywateli szlachty?”, Kwartalnik Historyczny, 94:3 (1987), 3–40. 5 See Robert I. Frost, “The Nobility of Poland-Lithuania, 1569–1795”, in Hamish M. Scott (ed.), The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, vol. 2, Northern, Central and Eastern Europe (Harlow: 1995), 183–222. 6 So did foreigners: “Poland-Lithuania” is a twentieth-century neologism, intended to distinguish between modern Poland and old “Poland”. To avoid anachronism, all place names in the Commonwealth are given in Polish, except for Warsaw, Cracow, and the largely Germanophone city of Danzig (Gdańsk). After 1686 the city of Kiev (Kyiv) lay outside the Commonwealth and the Catholic dioceses of that name. 7 The text and a translation may be found in M. B. Biskupski and James S. Pula (eds.), Polish Democratic Thought from the Renaissance to the Great Emigration: Essays