Maciej Gloger (Kazimierz Wielki University)

Political Theology of Henryk Sienkiewicz

Henryk Sienkiewicz included the basic assumptions developed and affirmed by modern political theology, though involuntarily and in an unsystematic manner, not only in the way he structured the Trilogy but also in his journalist writings. The fundamentals of this field of knowledge were laid in the 20th century, primarily by Carl Schmitt and Eric Voegelin.^[1]Reading the Trilogy is a constant reminder that you cannot create and maintain political order without regard for the organizing power of religion while introducing categories developed by modern thought (psychology, ethics and especially sociology, etc.) is only – as political theologists argue – a sectarian attempt to distort and appropriate the original theological categories developed by ancient and medieval thinkers. “Enlightened utilitarianism is but the first in a series of totalitarian, sectarian movements to be followed later by positivism, communism and national socialism.”^[2]

Sienkiewicz countered all the pretense of the modern mind with his oeuvre and his ideological stance. He refuted the looming communism by writing Whirlpools (Wiry) and national socialism by creating The Teutonic Knights (Krzyżacy), while his journalism accurately diagnosed the Prussian political system as one that could give rise to Nazism. Sienkiewicz incurred the anger of Polish positivists by writing the Trilogy, which negated Polish positivist utilitarianism and pointed to another identity source: Christian heroism. He was criticized by Roman Dmowski for his universalism, which the politician perceived as a type of cosmopolitanism.^[3] The creator of the Trilogy did not seem to please any of the political leaders, whereas he himself performed – unwittingly at first – a very important political job for the benefit of a community, which would certainly be less powerful if it was not for its theological dimension.

Let us try to discern here to what extent Sienkiewicz based his vision of a state on the pre-modern ideas, on the unconsciously perceived power of these traditions and to what degree he was forced to update and reclaim those archetypal ideas about the functioning of a community, especially in juxtaposition to the schools of Enlightenment and Polish positivism, which had largely shaped his generation and his own intellect. The destructive influence of those attitudes had become one of the main concerns of the political theologists, Voegelin in particular, who showed how the Enlightenment’s concepts of state, progress, and the social contract had intercepted and appropriated the theological categories.^[4]