Friars on the Frontier

Catholic Renewal and the Dominican Order in Southeastern Poland, 1594–1648

Piotr Stolarski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317132639
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Focusing on the Dominican Order's activities in southeastern Poland from the canonisation of the Polish Dominican St Hyacinth (1594) to the outbreak of Bogdan Chmielnicki's Cossack revolt (1648-54) this book reveals the renovation and popularity of the pre-existing Mendicant culture of piety in the period following the Council of Trent (1545-64). In so doing, it questions both western and Polish scholarship regarding the role of the Society of Jesus, and the changes within Catholicism associated with it across Europe in the early modern period. By grounding the rivalry between Dominicans and Jesuits in patronage, politics, preaching, and the practices of piety, the study provides a holistic explanation of the reasons for Dominican expansion, the ways in which Catholicisation proceeded in a consensual political system, and suggests a corrective to the long-standing Jesuit-centred model of religious renewal. Whilst engaging with existing research regarding the post-Reformation formation of religious denominations, the book significantly expands the debate by stressing the friars' continuity with the medieval past, and demonstrating their importance in the articulation of Catholic-noble identity. Consequently, the monograph opens up new vistas on the history of the Counter-Reformation, Polish-Lithuanian noble identity, and the nature of religious renewal in a multi-ethnic and multi-denominational state.

CHAPTER 1
Historiography: ‘Sarmatian Catholicism’ and the ‘Post-Tridentine Model’

It was the spearhead of the pastoral, active spirit of Counter-Reformation Catholicism, international, confident, determined, uncompromising, yet at the same time flexible, adaptable, ingratiating, modern. Taught by its founder, it sought to be on good terms with the highest authorities in both church and state and to turn their power and patronage to good account. But, in the tradition of its founder, too, it was determined that nothing should be allowed to stand against its will to serve the church according to the aims and spirit of its institute.1

Introduction

Evennett’s summary of the Society of Jesus reflects a widespread set of assumptions about the Counter-Reformation and post-Tridentine Catholicism as a whole. Few, if any, scholars have questioned the impact of the Jesuits. Founded by Ignatius of Loyola and approved in 1540, the Society quickly spread across Europe and numbered 15,000 members and 550 foundations by 16562 (with 433 members in 18 locations in Poland–Lithuania by 16003). Dedicated to the propagation and defence of the Catholic faith, they pursued these aims by preaching, missions, charity, ministering the sacraments and, above all, teaching.4 Many bishops, princes and nobles lent them support. Their novelty inhered not so much in content as in form: rejecting the common recitation of the office and sung high Masses, they operated independently, being regarded with suspicion, even jealousy, by the existing Orders. While perceived by some as duplicitous and secretive, they attracted many members of high calibre and were undeniably effective, utilising a variety of means (including theatre, art and scholarship) to spread and inculcate Catholicism, leaving an indelible mark on European culture.

This chapter describes and questions current perspectives on the Counter-Reformation in Polish and non-Polish scholarship, suggesting that the neglected mendicant culture could provide an important corrective.

Reform as Decline and Intolerance: ‘Sarmatian Catholicism’ in Polish Communist-Era Historiography

The Commonwealth of Poland–Lithuania, acquiring its constitutional form at the Union of Lublin (1569), represents a unique context for examining post-Tridentine Catholicism. Straddling the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, while also encompassing significant Jewish and Protestant populations, it was a religious and cultural melting pot. Added to this peculiar diversity was a distinctive political system, comprising a strong noble estate and elective monarchy, with legally-enacted religious toleration.5 Given these characteristics, the nature and impact of the Catholic renewal are undoubtedly fundamental problems – so far addressed largely impressionistically and unevenly.

The identification of Catholic renewal with the Jesuits is particularly strong in Polish scholarship, where a distinct change in culture from a ‘Renaissance’ pluralism and tolerance associated with the Commonwealth’s Golden Age of the sixteenth century to a narrower and reactionary ‘Baroque’ milieu of the silver seventeenth century is widely accepted. The Jesuits are given a central role in the supposed transition from one to the other by historians of the Church, politics and culture. While imbedded in the historical consciousness by nineteenth-century scholarship,6 the preservation of these ideas owes a great deal to the political context of post-1939 Poland, which encouraged research into Protestant minorities at the expense of the Catholic Church. Janusz Tazbir, a prominent member of a group of scholars emerging in the early 1960s (also including Maria Bogucka, Stanisław Cynarski and Zbigniew Kuchowicz),7 was one of few historians during the Communist period publishing on the social and political aspects of early modern Catholicism. His work, like that of all the above, was heavily influenced by the sociological methods of the Annales school. While he eschewed the quantification associated with that movement, he nevertheless focused on delimiting the sociological ‘average’ in noble culture, favouring a broad-brush approach to historical investigation and analysis. Most influential between the 1960s and late 1980s, Tazbir focused on culture and religion: on the nobility and the Jesuits, and the ‘characteristic’ features and ramifications of the Counter-Reformation across the early modern period.

According to Tazbir, and many other historians until recently, the nobility acquired and became increasingly entrenched in a conservative ideology known as Sarmatism8 during the seventeenth century. This ideology, building on the contemporaneous origin-myth which traced the elite back to ancient Sarmatian warrior-farmers, related to and facilitated the growth of noble power and collective identity. It encompassed and was manifested in beliefs and prejudices, customs and aesthetic preferences, as well as political ideas such as noble freedom and equality, which while initially fresh and distinctive, eventually paved the way for uncritical self-satisfaction, xenophobia, political anarchy and religious bigotry. This teleological thesis explained the idiosyncrasy and ultimate demise of the noble-dominated state and its culture by the eighteenth century. Because Tazbir defined Sarmatism as ‘the relic of a Counter-Reformation mentality and baroque lifestyle, current in many noble environments’,9 the role of Catholicism was integral to his perception of a fundamental shift between the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The Society of Jesus, representing (for him and for many Polish scholars) the quintessence of this role, functioned as the pivot between the two: and implicitly marked a ‘reaction’ away from the ‘progressive’ tolerance associated with the Reformation period. And yet, paradoxically, ‘Sarmatian Catholicism’10 itself was presented as superficial and superstitious, lacking in ‘spiritual depth’11 (precisely what the Jesuits were supposed to have inculcated).

This paradigm, while by no means accepted uncritically in Polish scholarship today, remains by far the dominant description of the Counter-Reformation currently in use. It owes a great deal to the positivistic methods of nineteenth-century historiography, its debates about the negative role of the Jesuits12 and its tendency to assess the nobility in nationalistic or functionalist terms (as either ‘progressive’ or ‘degenerate’). In some respects Tazbir was right to focus on change between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; precisely that period witnessed the development of noble power and privileges at a time of religious instability and Catholic resurgence. Clearly there were many changes over this period, and the Jesuits’ role in, among others, the Union of Brest, schooling, royal diplomacy and inter-confessional politics, cannot be overlooked. Nevertheless, keen (or, under the political circumstances, perhaps bound) to posit change and decline over time, he rarely considered continuity, questioned older patterns of interpretation, or dwelt on the reception, negotiation and appropriation of religious ideas. The so-called ‘nobles’ democracy’ (the much-vaunted noble-dominated parliamentary system) developed from the fourteenth century and continued to function in a largely Catholic noble culture; and yet the Jesuits’ ‘absolutism’ was taken for granted and portrayed as in some sense typical of Catholic culture as a whole. Thus Tazbir’s work (while not invariably hostile to Catholicism, and undergoing some change over time) tended towards a dialectical and functional analysis of religion, and did not seek to critically trace the organic vicissitudes of Catholicism in a wider chronological or cultural context: between the late medieval period, through Reformation to Catholic renewal, still less to approach it on its own terms.

With relatively few (non-clerical) specialists working on social and cultural aspects of religious history in recent decades, the influence of the Sarmatian-Catholic paradigm both within Polish and English-language scholarship has been great. If Polish scholarship has not invariably viewed the Jesuits negatively, despite the Communist-era context, their very instrumentalisation as the essence of ‘Counter-Reformation’ has contributed to an uncritical acceptance of many underlying theses and a fixation with one particular problem – religious toleration.13 Tolerance/intolerance, reinforcing analytical generalisation, has stagnated inquiry into culture generally by encouraging a priori classifications of political, religious and social phenomena. The consequences are twofold: the compartmentalisation of these areas, and the reinforcement of a vague and value-laden cultural paradigm: ‘Sarmatian Catholicism’. Both impede a truly holistic and nuanced appreciation of Catholic renewal in the multi-national Commonwealth. The paradigm has contributed to the misrepresentation of orthodox Catholicism in Poland–Lithuania as a movement characterised by an increasingly persecutory Catholic Church pandering to a slowly degenerating nobility, in a stagnating intellectual climate of empty rhetoric and rising religious fanaticism.14 If there is any truth in these assertions, it has been occluded by schematic generalisation and long-term ideological manipulation. Inadequately glossing noble-Catholic culture as characterised essentially by decline and bigotry, the model has never been directly challenged by in-depth research with a view to modifying its conclusions. The effects have been far-reaching: it has retained its currency as the foundation to a whole series of other problems. Crises such as Chmielnicki’s Cossack Revolt (1648–54) and wars with Sweden and Muscovy (1620s–60s) have often been analysed with reference to impressionistic interpretations of the Counter-Reformation linked to the Sarmatian-Catholic ‘mentality’.15 Given the enormous significance of the nobility in Poland–Lithuania and its bearing on so many problem areas, it is unsurprising that the daunting task of revising...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Convents of Dominican Friars in Southeastern Poland, 1594–1648
• Chronology
• Introduction
• 1 Historiography: ‘Sarmatian Catholicism’ and the ‘Post-Tridentine Model’
• 2 Dissonance in Catholic Culture: Anticlericalism and the Jesuits, 1573–1648
• 3 Renewing the Order of Friars Preachers, 1564–1648
• 4 Patrons and Patronage: Prince Władysław Vasa’s Generation
• 5 Prescribing Renewal: Fabian Birkowski and Dominican Preaching Culture
• 6 Internalising Renewal: Piety and Penance
• 7 Mendicant Catholicism: Dominicans and Catholic Noble Identity
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index