Although they gained an ascendancy, the Calvinists never managed to control the Protestant movement in Poland. The northern cities stood by Luther; Anabaptists seeking refuge from persecution in Germany appeared in various areas of the country in the 1530s; and in 1551 Dutch Mennonites set up a colony on the lower Vistula.
The Protestant sect which produced Poland’s most significant contribution to Christian philosophy was the Arians. Expelled from Bohemia in 1548, they settled in Poland, where they were known as ‘Czech Brethren’ and later Arians, since two of their fundamental beliefs—the human nature of Christ and the rejection of the Trinity—were first voiced by Arius at the Council of Nicea in AD 235. They also came to be known variously as Anti-Trinitarians, Polish Brethren and Socinians.
Theirs was a rationalist and fundamentalist response to the teachings of Christ, whom they held to be a divinely inspired man. They were pacifists, opposed to the tenure of civic or military office, to serfdom, to the possession of wealth, and to the use of money, believing as they did in the common ownership of all material goods.
They gained many converts—up to about 40,000 adherents practising in some two hundred temples scattered throughout the country. Their spiritual centre was Raków, where they established an academy, visited by students from all over Europe. It was here that the Raków Catechism was published, the work of Fausto Sozzini (Socinius), a nobleman from Siena who sought refuge in Poland and became one of the leading lights of the movement. The two most prominent Polish Arians were Marcin Czechowicz and Szymon Budny, the second of whom made a fine translation of the Bible into Polish and was also responsible for a rapprochement with the Jews, which produced some curious results.
The Jewish community had also been affected by the spirit of the times. The expulsions from the Iberian peninsula had brought many distinguished Spanish scholars to Poland, and in 1567 a Talmudic academy was founded at Lublin, with the eminent Solomon Luria as rector, which enriched the religious debate. The Jews were by no means united, as there were considerable colonies of Karaites in eastern Poland who accepted only the Bible and rejected the Talmud.
The Arians made many converts from the ranks of Talmudic Jews, while a number of Arians and Calvinists converted to Judaism. It was one of these converts, ‘Joseph ben Mardoch’ Malinowski, who played the most incongruous part in this religious inter action. It was he who put the finishing touches to the Hebrew original of The Fortress of the Faith, a Karaite catechism by Isaac ben Abraham of Troki, which was subsequently published in a number of countries, and was later rediscovered by Voltaire, who believed it to be the greatest demolition of the divinity of Christ ever written.
In other countries the established Church reacted with violence to the slightest departure from dogma, let alone to apostasy. The reaction of the Polish hierarchy was pragmatic, often cynical, sometimes vehement, but never hysterical. Bishop Drohojowski of Kujavia, a region profoundly affected on account of its many German-dominated towns, went out of his way to meet prominent Lutherans and sanctioned their takeover of the Church of St John in Gdańsk since most of the parishioners had gone over to the heresy. Elsewhere in his diocese he allowed the sharing of parish churches by Catholics and Lutherans.
A considerable proportion of the clergy were genuinely interested in the reform of the Church. The Christians of the Orthodox rite had always enjoyed three of the demands of the Protestant movement: the marriage of priests, the use of the vernacular in the liturgy, and communion in both kinds. The Protestant demands were therefore less shocking and novel in Poland than in other Catholic countries. It was not uncommon for Catholic priests to emulate their colleagues of the Orthodox rite by having common-law wives, and these were keen to regularise their position and legalise their broods. Stanisław Orzechowski (1513-66) married while Canon of Przemyśl, and defended his action in a long debate with his bishop and with Rome, published in pamphlet form.
Apart from the practical demands concerning marriage and the vernacular, Luther’s revolt aroused strong feelings among the clergy against the medieval practices of the Church. Marcin Krowicki (1501-73) left the priesthood and published his Defence of True Learning, a fiercely anti-clerical work in which the Papacy is referred to as the whore of Babylon. Bishop Uchański, on the other hand, did not forsake a career which was eventually to make him Primate of Poland, but nevertheless wrote vituperative diatribes against the practices of the Church. In 1555 he declared himself in favour of the marriage of priests, communion under both kinds and the use of the vernacular. He also mooted the idea of a joint synod of all confessions in Poland, to bring about reconciliation on common ground. When the King promoted him to the bishopric of Kujavia the Pope refused to ratify the appointment, but neither the King nor the Polish hierarchy took any notice.
King Zygmunt the Old (1506-48) felt that the religious debate was none of his business. He came under considerable pressure from Rome and from those of his own bishops who were in favour of stamping out the heresy. He was even reproached by Henry VIII of England for not taking a more energetic line against the Protestants. Whenever this pressure became overwhelming, he would take some action to satisfy the zealots, but his edicts were invalid without the approval of the Sejm. His attitude is summed up in the words of his successor, who shared it fully. ‘Permit me to rule over the goats as well as the sheep,’ he told one Papal envoy who was demanding arrests and executions.
In many countries the Reformation had social and political overtones. In Poland it was above all a constitutional issue. As the Papal Nuncio’s secretary noted after witnessing the debates of a Mazovian sejmik, the assembly seemed staunchly Catholic when the discussion turned on the faith, the sacraments and the sacred rites, but when the talk was of the privileges of the clergy, a number of ‘Protestant’ voices could be heard, and when it came to the subject of the Church’s immunity from taxation, the entire assembly appeared to have become fanatically Calvinist. In 1554, Bishop Czarnkowski of Poznań sentenced three burghers to death by fire for heresy, but they were rescued by a posse of mostly Catholic szlachta. The same bishop later sentenced a cobbler to the same fate, and this time over a hundred armed szlachta of all denominations, led by the foremost magnates, laid siege to the episcopal palace and freed the condemned man. On one or two occasions, the ecclesiastical courts managed to execute the sentence before anyone could take preventive action. In 1556 Dorota Łazewska, accused of stealing a host from a church and selling it to some Jews for alleged occult rites, was burnt at the stake in Sochaczew. The execution caused uproar, and this came in time to save the lives of the three Jews who were to be burnt on the next day. They too were saved by the intervention of Catholic as well as Protestant szlachta. As Jan Tarnowski pointed out, ‘It is not a question of religion, it is a question of liberty.’
All were agreed that there could be no liberty while a body independent of the parliamentary system was able to judge people, and the ecclesiastical tribunals’ jurisdiction was duly annulled by act of the Sejm in 1562. Two years later, when a young Arian, Erazm Otwinowski, snatched the monstrance from the prelate during a religious procession in Lublin, threw it on the ground and stamped on the Blessed Sacrament, shouting obscenities, he was brought before the Sejm tribunal. This body, made up of Catholics and Calvinists, heard the case and agreed broadly with the defence, ably conducted by the poet Mikołaj Rej, who argued that if God was offended, God would punish, and as for Otwinowski, he should be ordered to pay the priest ‘a shilling, so he can buy himself a new glass and a handful of flour’ with which to repair the monstrance and bake a new host.