As Archbishop and later as Cardinal, Wojtyla worked hand in glove with Wyszynski, learning from him firsthand not only the function of Interrex, but, more important, the geopolitical way to reason about the then all-embracing Leninism of the USSR and about the fateful weaknesses of the capitalist West.
Centuries before Karol Wojtyla walked the fields and forests and climbed the mountain slopes of Poland, the Pacts of Polishness earned for Poles the same enmity of worldly powers that Christ bequeathed to his followers. The Pacts provided Poles with the only means imaginable by which they were able to survive as a people for centuries, although deprived of their own sovereign government, their own nationhood and a territory they could call their own. Completely partitioned among Austrians, Russians and Germans from 1795 to 1918, then thoroughly sovietized structurally for forty years, Poles en masse were impermeable, and proved that resident in them was a self-propelling and unstoppable dynamism that maintained cultural, social and spiritual protective mechanisms and ensured the perseverance of the Polish racja stanu, the unforgettable and unbreakable will to survive. “As long as we live,” Poles always sang in their national anthem, “Poland lives….”
28
The Pacts of Extinction
The death and entombment of the First Polish Republic as a sovereign nation-state was an accomplished fact by 1795. It was the direct result of pacts for its extinction concluded between the Great Powers of Europe. It lasted a full 125 years, until 1919, when the Second Polish Republic was established, to live a precarious twenty-year existence until 1939, when, once more, its extinction was accomplished by Hitlerian Germany and Stalinist Russia, whose avowed aim was to liquidate forever not merely the nation-state of Poland but the Poles as a distinct ethnic and national group. No other great power in Europe really objected to that result. As David Lloyd George wrote in a well-publicized letter of September 28, 1939, “the people of Britain are not prepared to make colossal sacrifices to restore to power a Polish regime represented by the present government….” Lloyd George goes on to say that the USSR had every right to swallow up the Polish republic.
When the Western allies, Great Britain and France, did finally wage real war on Germany, ostensibly to free Poland, manifestly it was because they themselves were faced with a lethal threat. The “phony war” of September 1939 to March 1940 was a time of intensely studied options. It need not have ended with the waging of the real World War II at the beginning of spring 1940.
The “real proof of the pudding” came with the tragically erroneous Yalta and Potsdam agreements between Joseph Stalin and the Western allies: Poland was once more condemned to extinction, its people once more to be merged indistinguishably into the “peoples” and the “republics” of the Stalinist Gulag Archipelago—and that for another forty-three years. Another pact of Polish extinction.
Apart from the mortal blow to the rights of Poles as individuals and citizens, however, Poland’s planned extinction for a terrible total of 168 years was a geopolitical and historical mistake of universal proportions. Because the net result was a lopsided and unbalanced view of history, of history’s models and of history’s lessons for later generations, it was a mistake that was doomed to be repeated; and not only in Poland. And despite all its twists and turns and complications, Poland’s story from Renaissance times right into our own day makes it clear that the Soviets were by no means the first ideologically driven group to practice the professional elimination of whole blocs of history; nor were they the first to think up the dreadful stratagem of the “nonperson”—the person other people agree to pretend never existed.
But this extinction of Poland had one more result of far-reaching consequences: It bred among Poles and particularly in the men and women who were Karol Wojtyla’s intellectual, religious and moral mentors and political forebears a vivid realization of geopolitics. For their fate as a nation, their daily lives as a people, and the very reason for being Poles depended on vastly intricate affairs involving the Great Powers of world politics. The racja stanu about which the Poles were and are justifiably preoccupied—the raison d’être of Poland as a nation-state—has been so long entwined with international affairs and world-wide events that Poland has taken on a permanently geopolitical connotation.
The upper reaches of that connotation and its global dimension was guaranteed by the inherent Romanism of Poland and what it stands for. In a true but not derogatory sense, Poland became and is a regularly played pawn in the geopolitical game. Small wonder then that John Paul would come equipped geopolitically. The Pacts of Extinction ensured that much.
The three major forces that led directly to the demise of the First Polish Republic in 1795 sprang from such varied motives and backgrounds that, without the advantage of hindsight, one would have expected war to break out between them, rather than the fusion of interests that grew instead.
Two of those three major forces had their earliest beginnings in the deep and violent strains placed on European order and unity by the relocation of the papacy to Avignon in France for sixty-eight years, from 1309 to 1377; and by the Great Schism that followed for another thirty-nine years, from 1378 to 1417. If ever a door of change opened in the affairs of men and nations, those 108 years constituted such a door.
Until then, the papacy had been the only highly developed and stable institution for hundreds of years, giving to the medieval world a sense of order, unity and purpose. In that world of early Europe, everything—politics, commerce, civil law, legitimate government, art, learning—all depended on the ecclesiastical structure that stretched from pope to cardinals and bishops, priests and monks, and outward through all the ramifications of life.
With the Great Schism came a sudden shock of universal doubt as to which of three rival claimants was the valid successor of Peter the Apostle. And along with doubt, the first seeds of challenge to the established order blossomed among the intellectual, artistic and aristocratic circles of European society. Again, only historical hindsight allows us to see now that, with the Great Schism and the Avignon papacy, something vital had departed from papal Rome, something precious and valuable for the papacy’s name and standing. Men, for the first time, started to question papal claims. It was in this context that Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) announced the words she had heard in a vision of Heaven: “The Keys of this Blood will always belong to Peter and all his successors.”
The doctrinal revolt of John Wycliffe (1330-1384) in England, imitated and followed by Jan Hus (1370-1415) and his Hussites in Bohemia, was early warning of the trouble that was brewing. For on doctrinal bases, such men began to challenge the civil and political order established on the basis of papal authority.
In this unaccustomed climate of uncertainty and challenge that came to mark early-Renaissance Italy, there arose a network of Humanist associations with aspirations to escape the overall control of that established order. Given aspirations like that, these associations had to exist in the protection of secrecy, as least at their beginnings. But aside from secrecy, these humanist groups were marked by two other main characteristics.
The first was that they were in revolt against the traditional interpretation of the Bible as maintained by the ecclesiastical and civil authorities, and against the philosophical and theological underpinnings provided by the Church for civil and political life.
Given the first characteristic, the second was inevitable: a virulent, professional and confessional opposition to the Roman Catholic Church and, in particular, to the Roman papacy, both as a temporal power and as a religious authority.
Not surprisingly given such an animus, these associations had their own conception of the original message of the Bible and of God’s revelation. They latched onto what they considered to be an ultrasecret body of knowledge, a gnosis, which they based in part on cultic and occultist strains deriving from North Africa—notably, Egypt—and, in part, on the classical Jewish Kabbala.
The Kabbala, the highest reach of mysticism in Judaism�
�s long history, was a direct descendant of the ancient pre-exilic Jewish mystic tradition rooted in the Carmel figures of Elias and Elisha. It left definite traces in the canonical Jewish Bible—the Assumption of Elias, the Millenarianism of Amos, the Servant Songs of Deutero-Isaiah, the Chariot Visions of Ezekiel, the New Covenant prophecies of Jeremiah, the haunting beauty of Malachi’s prophecies.
The Jewish Kabbala itself was an attempt to outline how mere mortal man, within the strict Mosaic tradition of God’s total separateness from man, could attain knowledge—and ultimately, possession—of the divinity. For that knowledge, or Kabbala, would itself be possession. Toratic purity was the only preparation for the reception of Kabbala; and it would bring with it profound effects and changes in the material cosmos of man.
The Kabbala was, in other words, a spiritual doctrine about the intervention of the wholly alien and supernatural life of the one God, the Creator of all things, into the material cosmos.
Whether out of historical ignorance or willfulness or both, the Italian humanists bowdlerized the idea of Kabbala almost beyond recognition. They reconstructed the concept of gnosis, and transferred it to a thoroughly this-worldly plane. The special gnosis they sought was a secret knowledge of how to master the blind forces of nature for a sociopolitical purpose.
In the prescientific, pre-Enlightenment world, before Francis Bacon “rang the bell that called the wits together,” around 1600, that mastery involved, among other things, what is popularly but erroneously called “cabalistic” methods of alchemy—the effort to change the elemental nature of substances, mainly metals. In fact, the dedicated humanist cabalists were always seeking what was called the Philosopher’s Stone—a mineral that, by its merest touch, could transmute base metals such as lead into gold.
However, behind all that—behind the cabalists’ search for a secret knowledge of the forces of nature, and behind the myth of the Philosopher’s Stone—lay the yearning to regenerate the world, to eliminate the base or evil forces, and to transmute them into the gold of a peace-filled and prosperous human society.
Initiates of those early humanist associations were devotees of the Great Force—the Great Architect of the Cosmos—which they represented under the form of the Sacred Tetragrammaton, YHWH, the Jewish symbol for the name of the divinity that was not to be pronounced by mortal lips. They borrowed other symbols—the Pyramid and the All-Seeing Eye—mainly from Egyptian sources.
On such bases as these, the new associations claimed to be the authentic bearers of an ancient tradition that bypassed normative rabbinic Judaism and Christianity alike; a tradition from which both of those religions had sprung but which the cabalists insisted was purer and truer than either of them.
How far these occultist associations might have progressed and what their influence might have been in different historical circumstances must remain an open question. For, as it was, the humanist movement that produced such occult societies found fertile soil among dissidents beyond the Alps. As far as historical researches have gone, it would seem that through the entire swath of Central Europe—from the Alps right up through Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Germany and Scandinavia—there ran the same discontent with the established order, and the same tendency to throw over the dogmas of the Roman papacy in favor of a “more primitive” and, therefore, more faithful interpretation of the Bible events.
Without a doubt, the new secret associations were ready vehicles of that discontent. Over time, in fact, and through an unpredictable series of mergers and mutations, the offspring of these early-Renaissance humanist associations developed into a potent international religious and sociopolitical force that would determine a whole new set of European alliances, and the fate of nations—including the dismal fate that awaited Poland.
For one thing, as they spread northward beyond the Alps, they found adherents among already existing dissident groups such as the Moravian Brethren of Hussite origin, the Unitarians and the neo-Arians. There was no doubt that revolt was building. As that climate intensified, the northward spread and acceptance of the occultist humanists meshed chronologically and most importantly with the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation in the early 1500s.
As we now know, some of the chief architects of the Reformation—Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Johannes Reuchlin, Jan Amos Komensky—belonged to occult societies. And both Fausto and Lelio Sozzini, the Italian anti-Trinitarian theologians, found patronage, funds and a supporting network outside their native Italy. Socinianism, which takes its name from the two Sozzinis, was in fact well received among the brothers of the occult up north in Switzerland, Poland and Germany.
In other northern climes, meanwhile, a far more important union took place, with the humanists. A union that no one could have expected.
In the 1300s, during the time that the cabalist-humanist associations were beginning to find their bearings, there already existed—particularly in England, Scotland and France—medieval guilds of men who worked with ax, chisel and mallet in freestone. Freemasons by trade, and God-fearing in their religion, these were men who fitted perfectly into the hierarchic order of things on which their world rested. In the words of one ancient English Book of Charges, medieval freemasons were required “princypally to loue god and holy chyrche & alle halowis [all saints].”
Freemasons were quite separate from other stoneworkers—from hard hewers, marblers, alabasterers, cowans, raw masons and bricklayers. Freemasons were wage earners who lived a life of mobility and of a certain privilege. They were traveling artisans who moved to the site where they would ply their skills, setting up temporary quarters for their lodging, rest and recreation, and for communal discussions of their trade.
As specialists employed by rich and influential patrons, these artisans of freestone had professional secrets, which they ringed around with guild rules—the “Old Charges” of English and Scottish freemason guilds. That being the case, their lodging, or lodge, was off limits to all but accredited freemasons.
To foil intruders, they developed a sign among themselves—what English freemasons called the “’Word” but which might also be a phrase or a sign of the hand—by which to recognize a member who enjoyed the privileges of entry and participation in their lodge.
No one alive in the 1300s could have predicted a merger of minds between freemason guilds and the Italian humanists. The traditional faith of the one, and the ideological hostility to both tradition and faith of the other, should have made the two groups about as likely to mix as oil and water.
In the latter half of the 1500s, however, there was a change in the type of man recruited for the freemason guilds. As the number of working, or “operative,” freemasons diminished progressively, they were replaced by what were called Accepted Masons—gentlemen of leisure, aristocrats, even members of royal families—who lifted ax, chisel and mallet only in the ultrasecret symbolic ceremonies of the lodge, still guarded by the “Charges” and the “Mason Word.” The “speculative” mason was born.
The new Masonry shifted away from all allegiance to Roman ecclesiastical Christianity. And again, as for the Italian occultist humanists, the secrecy guaranteed by the tradition of the Lodge was essential in the circumstances.
The two groups had more in common than secrecy, however. From the writings and records of speculative Masonry, it is clear that the central religious tenet became a belief in the Great Architect of the Universe—a figure familiar by now from the influence of Italian humanists, a figure that cannot be identified with the transcendent God who chose the Jewish race as a special people or with the transcendent God of Christian revelation incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth. Rather, the Great Architect was immanent to and essentially a part of the material cosmos, a product of the “enlightened” mind.
There was no conceptual basis by which such a belief could be reconciled with Christianity. For precluded were all such ideas as sin, Hell for punishment and Heaven for reward, an eternally perpetual Sacrifice of the Mass, saints and
angels, priest and pope. Indeed, the whole concept of an ecclesiastical organization charged with propagating that Christianity, like the concept of an infallible religious leadership personalized in a pope wielding the irresistible Keys of Petrine authority, was considered to be false and antihuman.
In the inevitable rivalry that would develop between the Catholic and Protestant powers of Europe, the Roman papacy—still a temporal power well into the 1600s—would logically if unwisely take sides, even as the Lodge would associate itself with the Protestant elements involved in burgeoning struggle.
In the midst of all this gathering ferment stood Poland, still foursquare and vibrant in the strategic heart of Central Europe, and still foursquare in its fealty to the Holy See of Rome as declared in the Piast Pact. For well over five centuries, as hereditary monarchy, then as constitutional monarchy and as Unitary Republic, Poland had been the bulwark of Roman Christianity, and the one military force that halted the onrush of the Ottoman Turks.
However, even before her third and final victory under Jan Sobieski, over the Turks at Vienna in 1683, Poland’s geopolitical position in Europe had been radically altered by the Protestant Reformation launched over 150 years earlier, in 1517, by Martin Luther. In fact, whatever else it was intended or proved to be, in geopolitical terms the Protestant Reformation was a mega-earthquake. By the time of Sobieski’s 1683 triumph over the Turks, Poland was practically surrounded and certainly menaced by a newly Protestant world: Prussia, Sweden, Saxony, Denmark, Transylvania (Protestant Hungary). The enmity of those countries for Poland was shared by other emergent powers in Europe—notably England and Holland, both Protestant nations by then.
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