Poland as a separate country, an independent people and a sovereign nation literally ceased to exist in 1795.
With a brief twenty-one-year interlude (1918-39) of relative freedom for Poles, that period of nearly two hundred years constitutes an appalling litany of natural entombment, demographic enslavement, linguistic persecution, bloodshed, economic impoverishment, religious oppression, a general connivance among powerful nations to obliterate Poland as a nation-state from human memory, two world wars, a true genocide attempted by the Nazis with the scientific thoroughness of the German mind, a further attempt by the Soviets to eradicate Polishness with the ruthlessness achieved only by Stalinism. Poles as a race should have been demoralized beyond recovery, and their Polishness should have been mongrelized beyond repair by that sustained brutalization.
If any ethnic group in the society of nations today has an absolutely unassailable bill of indictment to urge at the bar of human justice, it is the Poles. But more important than the quest for a justice that is not available is the double question about Poland’s survival. How, out of that crippling maelstrom, have the Poles emerged as the one Eastern-bloc country capable of forcing the iron hand of imperial Leninism? And how is it that the grandiose figure of the “Polish Pope” comes striding tranquilly and carefully out of the same destructive obscurity, with rancor for none, not hobbled with parochialism, and with a spirit ranging over a geopolitical plane so all-inclusive and so universalist that he finds few genuine peers there?
Given those antecedents, this “Polish Pope” should not have so emerged, and Poland should have no real identity, unless, as has always been implied by “Polonia Sacra” the Poles are assigned a special role in our history by the sacralizing hand of the Lord of history. For sacra in that phrase means precisely “set apart,” “consecrated,” “specially appointed,” by the All-Holy.
Deepening this conclusion is the most glaring fact about the “Polish Pope.” Polishness made him.
The men and women who as role models, mentors, instructors, advisers and exemplars formed the character of Karol Wojtyla as the “Polish Pope” are all known to us. His parents, foster mother, brother; his priests, teachers, professors, personal friends; the bishops and cardinals who from early on had a say in his formation, the popes and politicians who overshadowed his days; the thinkers, philosophers, writers who took his mind by storm. We know their names and their occupations, where and how they lived, and how they died. And he is genuinely their child, the product of their highest ambitions and their deepest desires. We are not talking of predecessor Poles as distant as Archbishop Nicholas Traba of Gniezno or Stanislaw Cardinal Hosius of Warmia, each of whom was nearly named pope in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
John Paul’s fashioners in Polishness were in their majority Poles who were themselves without exception formed in that period of history that was admittedly the worst for Polishness—a matter of about six quite recent generations. Karol Wojtyla belongs to them; he is no Melchizedek, without pedigree, without ancestors; nor is he some “troubled” integrist, breaking away from the tradition that made him and seeking a new identity, wider than that into which he was born and fitted by his fashioners. His spiritual heritage came into his hands from them. His politics and his Polishness, his geopolitics and his faith, are their gifts to him. What transformations he has wrought in the meantime are merely a function of his larger-than-life destiny as presiding Pope of the millennium endgame.
If any of those now dead men and women were to walk the earth today, they would readily recognize this “Polish Pope” as theirs. His challenge to Poland’s Stalinist government in 1979 would be the same as the challenge they flung at equally godless destroyers in their own day. The prime victims of “sinful structures” imposed on them by the malicious consensus of Austrians, Germans and Russians, they would identify immediately with John Paul’s excoriation of the “sinful structures” evolved from the consensus of East and West and imposed on East European nations during the 1945–85 period. The materialism of Leninist Marxism and raw capitalism was no worse than the materialism of Poland’s captors during her long night of entombment, the evil of materialism they knew firsthand; and more than two generations of them felt the Soviet whip across their backs.
More important than any other gift to Karol Wojtyla, those predecessors and ancestors were forced by historical circumstances to adopt a geopolitical attitude of mind and outlook when all around them and among them there reigned an arrogant set of nationalistic, parochial-minded emperors and kings and governments. Peculiar to the Poles was the deep-set conviction that geopolitics implied georeligion, and that their georeligion—Roman Catholicism—implied geopolitics. On top of all that, each of those ancestors of Wojtyla could have chosen—many did—Karol Wojtyla’s personal motto, Totus Tuus. For the Virgin Mary was their chosen icon of hope during a long, dark night.
For all of that is the patrimony, the spiritual heritage of Karol Wojtyla specifically as a son of Poland; and it came into his hands from his Polish ancestors and mentors. In their majority, they were themselves formed in the period that was at once the worst and the most miraculous time for a nation of people whose singular history is based on improbabilities and miracles. They were the bearers and the embodiment of the Poland that has always been and still remains the geopolitical plaque tournante of “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.” This is the Poland that has long been called Polonia Sacra, a people certain that its nationhood is guaranteed not by any government or state but by a sacred undertaking of God, with whom they have, as a nation, made a series of three solemn pacts. Poland might be crucified as a nation-state; but Poland would not die. God would not fail the Poles.
Still, there are deep questions about the policies and actions of Pope John Paul II to which even some of those who understand him best cannot find the answers. What precisely does he envisage for his present world by way of geopolitical structure? Why has he not undertaken a thorough reform of his crumbling Roman Catholic institutional organization? He justly abhors Marxism, and he holds socialism to be merely the anteroom of spiritual decadence that prepares the way for Marxism. He sees and has said in unexceptionable terms that capitalism of itself has no human solutions, only human skills and techniques for material advantage and economic aggrandizement. What, then, does he think should be the economic-political character of a viable new world order? At times, both in Church and in state questions, he seems to be waiting, to be preparing, to be temporizing. What is he waiting for? Why does he hesitate or temporize?
The roots of his geopolitical and georeligious outlook are already discernible in the history of his beloved Poland; half the enigma John Paul presents to the world outside him can thus be solved. But the other half is all the more enigmatic and the more important for ordinary men and women. At a time when many are convinced that the dawn of ultimate world peace has already started by 1990, John Paul II manifestly disagrees. Clearly, he is convinced that the world as a family and the nations as a society face the same danger of extinction that Poland once faced. Yet he is no pessimist. What is the basis of his negative reading of our human chances? And, then again, why the apparent optimism? For the answer to that half of the enigma, we have to do more than understand his Polish heritage. For the solution, we have to look outside Poland to the georeligious and geopolitical event par excellence.
27
The Pacts of Polishness
The geopolitical idea so often expressed by Pope John Paul and Mikhail Gorbachev that the world, or at least a good part of it, comprises “one family” is not farfetched. There is a broad consensus among anthropologists, linguists, agrospecialists and cultural experts that some relatively short time after the last glaciers receded from the Eurasian landmass—about twelve thousand years ago—there flourished the remote ancestors of almost all the peoples now occupying “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals,” and North America, as well.
“Caucasians,” as this ancient race is called,
are identified by scholars as possessing the “Kurgan culture” and as speaking the mother tongue that is considered the root of all Western languages of today. They hunted and fished and foraged for food in the steppe lands between the Caspian and Black seas on the northern side of the Caucasus mountain range, that three-hundred-mile-long bastion that blocks passage south into the fertile plains of what we know as central Turkey and the Middle East.
In the west of that mountain range, Europe’s highest peak, the 18,841-foot dormant volcano of Mount Elbrus, brooded down upon them, capped with its clouds, cloaked in its winds, its mists, its gods and its imagined mysteries. To the north, green expanses rolled into the heartland of Russia, all the way to the Ural Mountains and the Siberian lowlands.
Sometime before 7000 B.C., a vast revolution changed the Caucasians’ way of life and ushered them on to their destiny. From being simple food gatherers, they became food producers. The earliest farming communities known to us existed in that area. They discovered and learned the early techniques of crop rotation and stock breeding. Human procreation became a source and a cause of blessings in the new society. More hands were the key to tilling more soil. Some of the oldest and most frequently found relics from this period are figurines of a goddess whose most distinctive traits—distended belly, large breasts—emphasized female fertility.
The sequel is easy to understand. More soil—more land—meant outward expansion. According as the population increased with every generation—each thirty years or so—more land was tamed and more was needed. Anthropologists speculate that the population would have expanded outward by thirty or forty miles with each new generation. It may have been much faster, however; for by 6500 B.C., Caucasian farming methods had reached Greece. And by 3500 B.C., they were practiced as far west as the Orkney Islands, off Scotland.
Mount Elbrus and the Caucasus range, which blocked the east and south, determined that part of Caucasian expansion and conquest would be northward into the Russian heartland; and then westward as far as Galway Bay and the Atlantic and—give or take a millennium or two—on as far as the eastern rim of the Pacific Ocean.
Constantly on the go, the Caucasian people superimposed themselves and their language where they went. The basic linguistic unity of “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” is scarcely violated by the Asianic origin of Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian. Even languages such as Basque and Albanian, which seem so alien to modern Western languages, are offsprings of the original Caucasian mother tongue.
In the millennium of their first great expansion, their constant migration and the tyranny of distance meant inevitably that whole groups of Caucasian peoples became separate and lived apart. Dialects of the original language developed—Slavonic, Teutonic, Celtic and Italic, for example. By sometime around 3000 B.C., whole areas were distinguished one from another by different languages—the dialects of the original Caucasian.
One newly developed language in particular—Old Slavonic, spoken by people who were called Slavs—held sway some hundreds of miles eastward from the Elbe River into the Russian heartland, southward as far as the Peloponnesus in Greece, and southeastward into what is today the Ukraine; and of course, it remained in the original steppe lands between the Black Sea and the Caspian. To describe themselves, as historiographer Iwo C. Pogonowski points out, Slavs said that they were people “who communicated by word of mouth” (slovo = the spoken word), as distinct from people of unintelligible language or those who were dumb and speechless.
Long before Athens reached for the glory that was Greece, the Caucasian populations of eastern Europe had subdivided into Baits and Germans to the north, with Slavs covering the remaining portion of central and eastern Europe. Once the Caucasians had taken possession of the vast landmass, only small pockets of racially different peoples established themselves within the Caucasian domain—the Asianic Estonians on the Baltic, and the Asianic Finns in Finland by the first century A.D., for example, and the Magyars in Hungary about the ninth century A.D. The South Semitic peoples, inflamed by Islam, tried for a thousand years, from about 600 A.D., to subdue the Caucasians and occupy their lands; but, in the end, even that bloody enterprise was ended.
The Slavs formed closely knit communities. They lived by their agriculture and traded with surrounding communities. They had a communal system of self-government that depended for its stability on the consensus reached among themselves. And they laid great store by the agreements they hammered out in frank discussions as among equals. The practice of the sobor—the communal gathering where all decisions affecting the community were reached by consensus—was typically Slav. The principle was not of the majoritarian one-man, one-vote variety. Rather, the principle was sobornost, the feeling and thinking consensus of the sobor’s participants.
By about 700 A.D., two powerful Slav kingdoms emerged. One was centered in the area between modern Poland’s two rivers, the Oder and the Vistula. The other, calling itself Rus, was centered in Kiev. Both were considered integral parts of that “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” of which John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev speak so passionately and persistently today; and both were part of that “one family” about which both of these leaders speak. From Poland’s Oder River to Russia’s Dnieper River, the entire area was considered the traditional homeland of the Slavs. There, the different and definitive traits of Polishness and Russianness were molded out of the lineage and the language of their common Caucasian heritage.
A tradition of Polish folklore tells us that a man named Lech—one of three brothers of the Piast family, which belonged to the tribe of Polanians, or Polanie—was fatefully led one day by a white eagle to a place near its aerie. There, at a site called Gniezno—a name that means “nest” or “cradle”—Lech founded his new kingdom of Polania, which would be ruled by the Piast dynasty for four hundred years.
What seems undoubted in this tradition is that the founder of the Piast dynasty was what we call today an ordinary man of the people, living on the land of the Poles. The white eagle he is said to have followed is still the official emblem of Poland; and the dynasty he is said to have founded came to symbolize the tradition of Poles in their unity as a people in unbroken continuity on the land of their ancestors.
It was of that ancient and enduring tradition that Pope John Paul reminded the world when he spoke at Gniezno in 1979. “Here,” he said, “… I greet with veneration the nest of Piast, the origin of the history of our motherland and the cradle of the Church…. We are a people he [God] claims for his own. All together, we form also the royal race of the Piasts.”
The historical record tells us that sometime around the year 840 A.D., the leader of the Polanian Slavs—a man of the Piast family whose name was in fact Chrosciszko—founded the Piast dynasty and that he formed its kingdom mainly by the union of his Polanians with five other tribes: Vistulans, Polabians, Silesians, Mazovians and Cassubians, or East Pomeranians. The members of that kingdom called themselves Polacy.
For the first hundred years of its existence, Poland was a ragged patch of territory, a hazardous enterprise from the beginning. Lacking any effective natural land barriers for its borders, separated only by vast forests from the normal trade and migration routes, the territory and nation of Poland, with its capital city at Gniezno, was in a precarious position. Situated in the middle of the Slav peoples, the inhabitants of the “Polish fields”—pola means exactly that: fields—were an obvious target for greedy neighbors. And from the beginning such neighbors were plentiful—mainly German, Slav and Asianic tribes on the search for fresh territory.
To Poland’s immediate south lay the Slav kingdom of Great Moravia. To its east, the duchy of Kiev bristled with warlike intent. To its north and west were the Baits and the Germans. Within that first century, one part of Great Moravia disappeared into the German empire, and the rest was overrun by invading Magyars. To Poland’s east, the Ruthenian Slavs constituted a new threat.
By the time Poland made it into the second ce
ntury of its uncertain existence as a nation, two different but authentic Christian traditions had taken hold in most of Europe. Except for a large portion of Scandinavia and the territory until recently called Prussia, Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals was known as Christendom. “Europe,” as Hilaire Belloc wrote, “was the Faith, and the Faith was Europe.”
Although one as far as religion went, Christendom nonetheless was divided into two distinct portions following two distinct traditions. The line of division fell roughly along the meridian that separates the European landmass into east and west, running from Finland in the far north, stretching southward along the Elbe River in today’s Germany to the Adriatic Sea around the heel of Italy.
Europe east of that line was the territory mainly of the Slav peoples. Their formative religious and cultural tradition stemmed from the most glorious and most long-lived empire ever fashioned by man—the Byzantine empire of the Greeks—whose capital, Constantinople, was perched strategically on the connecting water lane between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, that is to say, between the European and Asian landmasses.
Europe west of that line was populated in the main by Nordic, Germanic and Romance peoples. Their formative religious and cultural tradition sprang from the Roman and Latinate mind. During the first thousand years of Christian papal Rome as a visible power among men—from 400 to 1400 A.D.—the Roman papacy and its ecclesiastical structure, the Church, were the fashioners of that Western culture and tradition.
Poland found itself in a peculiar position. Geographically, it was already the plaque tournante of inner-European political stability and power balance. While most of its territory lay in the western region, it straddled the east-west division. It stood as an open gateway into the heart of Russia in one direction, and into the lands of the west in the other. Moreover, it was the vital middle ground between northern and southern Europe. Given the fact that both Rome and Constantinople were vibrant and expansionist in every sense—religiously, culturally, politically and territorially—neutrality was not an option. Poland had to chose between east and west, or be overrun.
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