Abstract
The Our Father deserves both more and less attention than I propose to give it. On the one hand, this work is usually considered the culmination of Cieszkowski’s life and writings. Apparently, the author himself gave rise to such interpretation on his deathbed by referring to it as “the trunk of which all else (he) wrote or did are but branches”1. By extension — and with scant regard to the text itself — the Our Father is considered sometimes as a summary or even an apogee of Polish Messianism2. Certainly, in terms of scope, ambition and its author’s devotion to it, this work surpasses any of Cieszkowski’s single publications. It is a grand, and even moving, vision which commands attention if one is to understand the impulse behind Cieszkowski’s numerous writings and activities. On the other hand, one cannot escape the fact that the Our Father, in spite of its three or four volumes, is an unfinished, and in large part, unpublished work whose posthumous publication the author hardly encouraged3. I would suggest that this reluctance goes well beyond the reasons suggested by his contemporaries — the fear of scandalizing the Church and the salons 4.
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Notes
This statement of the author, obviously unverifiable, is relayed by his son in the preface to Ojcze Nasz, vol. I, 1st ed. As I have suggested in the introduction, August Cieszkowski, Jr. is a most unreliable source in his zeal to prove the orthodoxy of his father’s doctrines and to emphasize the mysticism in his methods.
This is the position taken most consistently by Cieszkowski’s biographers, e.g., Zółtowski, op. cit., etc.
See A. Cieszkowski, Jr., preface to Ojcze Nasz, vol. III, 1st ed., p. 1: quoting Cieszkowski Sr. on his deathbed: “The times have not yet come. I did not want a stone of construction to become a stone of offense. This is why the Our Father has not been published. — But perhaps now these times are approaching. From the Syllabus to Rerum Novarum we have covered quite some distance. Publish the Invocation (i.e., volume II, 1st ed.-AL)-Do not read the Prayers, until you have published the former (i.e., Invocation — AL). You will then decide yourself whether they are to be published already”. In fact, the Ojcze Nasz was published twice: edited by A. Cieszkowski Jr., in four volumes between 1899 and 1906; vol. I reprinted the Paris edition of 1848 (Introduction) prefaced by the article ‘O Drogach Ducha’ (On the Ways of the Spirit), vol. II (the Invocation), vol. III (Hallowed be Thy Name), vol. IV (Thy Kingdom Come); edited by A. Zółtowski, 1922–23, in three volumes, containing all the first edition as well as the third through seventh prayers (‘Thy Will be Done’ through ‘Deliver us from Evil’ and the ‘Amen’). I quote here from vol. I and III of the 2nd edition and II of the 1st edition.
Trentowski, B., Panteon Wiedzy Ludzkiej, Posen, 1874, p. 222. Even though Trentowski gives these reasons he too seems skeptical whether these are the real reasons: “Why did not August publish the rest of his work? Remember the shallow opinion after publication (of the first volume in 1848 — AL) that this was a brilliant heresy… So the results they (i.e., lords and priests — AL) draw is that August, frightened by the judgement of the vox populi and not wanting to break completely either with the church or the salons did not publish the rest of his work. This is a very unworthy opinion! August is not in the least a person who would pay much attention to such petty and miserable views. He is an elevated spirit and hence prepared to expose himself to everything in order to serve mankind and the nation honestly. He knows that the truth leads to the cross but redeems the world”
Kühne, Graf August Cieszkowski, p. 55, who cites this interpretation is similarly skeptical. Cieszkowski Junior also claimed that the sudden revelation took place at a Mass of thanksgiving for the recently completed Prolegomena zur Historiosophie, thus placing the writing of that work some five to six years earlier than all textual and secondary materials (Cieszkowski’s letters to Michelet, Diaries, etc.). Above all, common sense revolts against the theory that the Prolegomena was written before Cieszkowski was eighteen years old and that the Our Father was the work of a virtual adolescent, not to speak of the difficulty of explaining any sort of evolution in Cieszkowski’s views, after the age of twenty-one or so and until his death at eighty.
The passages of the Diaries which have found their way verbatim into the Our Father, not to speak of those which constitute the raw material for numerous arguments in the work, are too frequent to be cited here. The most direct allusion to the project of the Our Father is to be found in Diaries, p. 15. Here, Cieszkowski speaks of prophecy as extending beyond the Christian era and talks of the Biblical manna as a prototype of “our daily bread”.
Kühne, ‘Neue Einblicke…’, op. cit., cites a letter from Cieszkowski to F. Benary dated 1876 which asks for clarification of certain Hebrew terms referring to God and corresponds exactly to a discussion in volume III of the Our Father, 1st ed., p. 25.
Wojtkowski, in Jakóbczyk, Wielkopolanie XIX-go wieku, maintains that a note on alcoholism in volume II of the Our Father dates from the very end of Cieszkowski’s life.
The Amen, Ojcze Nasz, vol. III, 2nd ed., pp. 283–286, is the only part of the Our Father which is dated in the manuscript. Only if one assumes, however, that the work as a whole was written virtually in one sitting can one take the date 1836 on the conclusion of the work to indicate the date of its termination as a whole.
This is the claim made in an editorial note (page unnumbered) to volume II of the first edition where the probable date of composition of the first volume is inferred to be the 1840’s while the second volume is said to date from 1837 or 1838. There is no basis for this hypothesis other than August Cieszkowski Junior’s affirmations. As he himself admits, however, his father had never spoken a word to him of the Our Father until the eve of his death. See Kühne, Graf August Cieszkowski, p. 254.
Ibid., p. 251.
Krasiński, Listy do Augusta Cieszkowskiego,…, vol. I, p. 231, dated 7 February 1847.
Ibid., p. 253, dated 17 March 1847.
As Kühne points out, op. cit., p. 267, this division occurs in the Philosophy of History, edited by Lasson but not in that of E. Gans. Cieszkowski, of course, was familiar with the latter.
See Castella, op. cit., passim.
See Charleton, op. cit., p. 84, for a discussion of Leroux. For an excellent article on Fourier as Messianist as well as on the general problématique of French socialism qua Messianism, see Henri Desroche, ‘Messianismes et Utopies’, Archives de Sociologie des Religions, VIII, July-December 1959, pp. 31–46. Also Louvancour, op. cit., passim.
For Cabet, see Lichtheim, Charlton, op. cit. For królikowski, see Jan Turowski, Utopia społeczna Ludwika Królikowskiego, Warsaw, 1958, as well as Trentowski, Panteon Wiedzy Ludzkiej, pp. 180–200.
See E. Gilson, Les métamorphoses de la Cité de Dieu, Paris, 1952.
See M. Reeves, The influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages, London, 1969
For Joachim’s influence on the philosophy of history as a whole see Karl Löwith, Meaning in History, Chicago, 1949, esp. pp. 145–159 and 208–213.
Gotthold E. Lessing, The Education of the Human Race trans, by F. W. Robertson, London, 1927, p. 3.
Gotthold E. Lessing, The Education of the Human Race trans, by F. W. Robertson, London, 1927, p. 16.
A work which puts Schelling in proper perspective is X. Tilliette, Schelling, II vols., Paris, 1970. For Hegel, see J. D’Hondt, Hegel secret. For the mystical undercurrent in German Idealism, see Benz, The Education of the Human Race trans, by F. W. Robertson, London, 1927, p. 16.
Oeuvres, op. cit., vol. III.
Ibid., p. 117.
Ibid., p. 114.
Ibid., p. 148.
Kühne, op. cit., p. 261, again quoting Cieszkowski Junior, maintains that the ‘Ways of the Spirit’ were written before volume I and were originally intended as the introduction to the whole work. However, a note in the text itself indicates that Cieszkowski was working on the ‘Ways of the Spirit’ about 1863, Ojcze Nasz, vol. I, 2nd ed., p. XXIII.
Walicki, ‘Dwa mesjanizmy: Adam Mickiewica i August Cieszkowski’, in Filozofia a Mesjanizm, p. 86.
The phrase “a new explosion of Christianity” is among Cieszkowski’s favourites. He repeats it several times throughout the Our Father, for the first time in volume I, p. 26. The expression might be attributable to de Maistre.
Fourier, Théorie des quatre mouvements. Cieszkowski does not mention Fourier here but specifically refers to Fontenelle and to Kant’s Allgemeine Naturgeschichte des Himmels.
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Liebich, A. (1979). Our Father. In: Between Ideology and Utopia. Sovietica, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9383-9_12
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