Polish and British messianism (an attempt at a perspective)

Abstract

British messianism and British millenarianism evolving between 1650 and 1800 (according to Richard H. Popkin) cannot be simply transferred into the ideas of Polish messianism and Polish millenarianism; however, the protocol of differences seems inspiring enough to open a space for appropriate ideological and personal comparisons. In this study I have attempted to bring closer together Kazimierz Brodziński’s concept of the ‘Slavic antiquity’ confronted with Samuel Richardson’s ‘Anglo-Saxon antiquity;’ I also collided with each other Gilberte Cheyne’s concept of mystical somatism and the Genesis concept of the body and corporeality developed by Juliusz Słowacki (there are more similarities in this case – for example the vision of Cheyne’s Paradise of the Faithful and Słowacki’s ‘Solar Jerusalem’). Polish messianism, in contrast to the British one, tends to deterritorialize the category of the nation and replace concepts of this sort with a project of embodied, instantiated eschatology, verbalized among others in Zygmunt Krasiński’s About the Position of Poland from the Divine and Human Vantage Point. In contrast to British messianism, scientific or semi-scientific, the Polish one has the potential to generate a system, is poetic and freely dialectical in accordance with the principle loosening reflection: disputandi more, asserendi more. This is evident in various and at first glance unexpected juxtapositions: including the concept of messianism as a liberating, decolonizing project in George Berkeley’s and Cyprian Norwid’s thinking, or the messianic idea of reading the Bible in the mirabilistic, irrational key of August Cieszkowski (God and Palingenesis) as well as in the anti-mirabilistic, rational key of Matthew Arnold (God and the Bible).