Multiconfessionalism and interconfessionality: religious "toleration" in Royal Prussia, Lithuania, and the Ruthenian lands

ENWhen, in 1582, the Catholic Church adopted the Gregorian Calendar, the Lutherans in Vilnius (Pol. Wilno) had no objections. The Jesuit Stanisław Grodzicki described their reaction: “I know what the heretics of the Saxon faith say, both in Germany ... and also here, that this [adherence to the new calendar] is a voluntary matter.” The Lithuanian Lutherans accepted the new rule as part of religious adiaphora - indifferent matters - not worth fighting over. Another Jesuit, Marcin Łaszcz, praised such interconfessional understanding in 1594 with a pinch of sarcasm, when he wrote to Simon Teofil Turnowski, a member of the Bohemian Brethren: “I certainly have cause to praise you, in that you have received our dear St Wojciech and St Stanisław into your Church and, as I hear, have written them into your calendar. What is more, you have converted these saints to your faith.” Łaszcz, however, was more overtly critical of the Protestants’ habit of eating meat on fast days: “Poles have not eaten meat on Saturday for 600 years; it has only been during the time of you Lutherans that such gluttony has begun.” In a variation on the anticlerical critique of priests living the good life, Łaszcz then turned against the Vilnian Lutherans, telling the story of a minister who, while looking into a henhouse to choose his roast dinner, had fallen from the ladder and broken his neck. Nationalizing his insults, the Jesuit wished the Lutheran minister to go “to hell, where a third of all devils already speak German.” Strikingly, this Catholic author, while identifying himself as a Pole, denies Turnowski - wrongly identified as a Lutheran - the same nationality. Łaszcz’s implication is that all Lutherans are Germans, identified by their “Saxon faith.” This assumption was not uncommon at the time.Ioannes Dantiscus (Pol. Jan Dantyszek; Ger. Johannes Dantiscus, 1485–1548), bishop of Warmia (Ger. Ermland) and Chełmno (Ger. Kulm), suspected his priests of Lutheranism because they sang hymns in the vernacular German that many inhabitants of Royal Prussia still spoke in 1534. Yet, despite such views of the “Saxon heresy,” the Protestant Reformation in Poland-Lithuania was not just a German import, but rather a “multicultural” event. Adherents of several versions of the Reformation arrived in Poland from abroad: Lutherans from Ducal Prussia, Western Pomerania, and Silesia; Scottish, French, and Swiss Calvinists and Zwinglians; Utraquists and the congregationalist traditions of the Bohemian Brethren; Dutch Mennonites; Venetian Anabaptists; and eventually Antitrinitarians following the ideas of Lelio and Fausto Sozzini (1525–1562 and 1539–1604, respectively). But the Reformation also had native, Polish-Lithuanian roots: early Lutheran Danzig (Pol. Gdańsk); the Humanist circles and their Erasmian outlook in Kraków; the Philippists in Wielkopolska . After his return from England and Frisia in 1556, Jan Łaski (1499–1560) helped create the presbyterian-synodal structures of the Calvinist Church in Poland, while Andrzej Wolan (Lat. Andreas Volanus, 1531–1610) supported the Calvinist Radziwiłłs to do the same in Lithuania. Poland-Lithuania had a long tradition of the coexistence of different cultures, languages, and national identities, preceding the Reformation and intersecting with multiple religious practices - in particular, with Latin and Eastern Christianity.According to a British traveler to Poland-Lithuania at the turn of the sixteenth century, its form of multiculturalism and multiconfessionalism had been highly successful: “Religion in thys lande is manifold, bothe for manyfest opposition and diversity of sectes, which commes, for that it confynes with nations of most contrary rites, all men drawing by nature some novelty from theire neighboures.” “Foreign” customs became acceptable in a religious context in which they were considered as irrelevant adiaphora, or where they turned into new hybrid forms, as in the Lutheran acceptance of the Catholic calendar or saints’ images. Sensitivities varied: as we have seen, liturgical singing in a foreign language triggered suspicion. The “nationalization” of heaven and hell went hand in hand with learned treatises promoting or rejecting the enforcement of religious unity by decrees and punishments [p. 45-46].