Still Running Off at the Keyboard

MICKIEWICZ'S MESSIANISM AND THE CHURCH TODAY

Why does all of this matter? Who cares what a Polish poet, long dead and buried, thought and wrote?

CCC 676 The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatalogical judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the names of millenarianism, especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.

In other words, the activities of Mickiewicz have been proscribed. Mickiewicz's ideology and activities were political and eschatalogical. He saw his nation as the vehicle for the salvation of the Jews and the world, and he formed secret societies to promote that vision, specifically in the occult underground in Paris of the mid-1800s. That underground was built on visionary experiences through the efforts of Eliphas Levi who used magical formulas to evoke spirits. He learned his techniques, according to Webb, from a Polish source:

It was from Polish sources that Alphonse Louis Constant, the famous "Eliphas Levi," derived his knowledge of the Cabala; and Constant himself is responsible for almost single-handedly turning the Secret Traditions into a romantic mixture suitable for popular consumption. His initiator was the third member of the Messianic trio, [of Mickiewicz, Towianski, and] Joseph Maria Hoene-Wronski.

Wronski was born in Wolsztyn in Poland in 1776, the son of the court architect, Antoine Hoene--the "Wronski" was a later addition. In the Polish rebellion of 1794 he distinguished himself during the defense of Warsaw but was later captured by the Russians, with whom he took the opportunity to enlist. In 1797 he left the Russian army with the rank of major, to spend the next three years studying philosophy in Germany, chiefly the system of Kant. In 1800 his dormant sense of patriotism revived and he set off to join the Polish Legions [which Mickiewicz was instrumental in forming] then gathering in Italy under Dombrowski to free their homeland. But the patriot succumbed to the man of science and Wronski...returned to scientific researches in Marseilles where he worked at the Observatory.... (James Webb, THE OCCULT UNDERGROUND p. 257-28)

Wronski developed a "Law of Creation", a mathematical formula comprehensible only to a mathematician. Webb indicates:

Wronski's supporters derive his theories from his mathematical studies and the influence of Kant. But it is just as likely that they came from mystical experience and a knowledge of the Cabala. That Wronski was knowledgeable in Cabalistic matters was obvious to early commentators on his work. He also knew Boehme and was familiar with Gnostic teachings. Like more mystical Traditionalists, Wronski maintained that the goal of man was to become God-like; like other occultists, he veiled his meaning with an impenetrable curtain of jargon. His teachings were not for the vulgar but only for those who would make the effort to penetrate his mathematics. Such indications would be sufficient to place Wronski among the Traditionalists even had Eliphas Levi not been more specific. Wronski, he wrote, wished no one to know that he was a Cabalist and studied magic. (pp. 258-59)

We have another word today for the activities of the Paris occultists. We call it "channeling", and it is forbiden by CCC 2116.

Polish Catholicism, or at least some expressions of it, ventured into forbidden territory. Perhaps this was the result of the impact the large Jewish presence had on Poland of the 1700s and 1800s. The Jewish Virtual Library explains that

There were three partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and in 1795. Poland was divided among Russia, Prussia and Austria; Poland-Lithuania no longer existed. The majority of Poland’s one-million Jews became part of the Russian empire. Poland became a mere client state of the Russian empire. In 1772, Catherine II, empress of Russia; discriminated against the Jews by forcing them to stay in their shtetls and barring their return to the towns they occupied before the partition. This area was called the Pale of Settlement. By 1885, more than four million Jews lived in the Pale.

LNT Poland claims

Poland became host over time to the largest concentration of Jews in Europe and the most potent hub for Jewish culture as well. Poland became home to primarily the Ashkenazi (Jews from Central and Eastern Europe), and the Sephardi (Southern European Jews including refugees from 15th century Spain and Portugal). There existed a diversity of various religious and cultural currents, from Chassidim ( a movement for religious renewal in Poland as Podolia (now the Ukraine) under the leadership of the legendary Baal-szem-tov (born 1700) all the way through progressive movements of the Enlightenment - the Maskilim (proponents of assimilation).

With a large and welcome Jewish population--welcome because of their particular talents needed in a developing hub of humanity-- it seems likely that Jewish beliefs would influence Catholicism, and that seems to be what research is turning up with regard to the Paris occult revival. It was fueled by a Polish mixture of mystical doctrine taken from Sabbatianism/Frankism/Hassidim, and combined with Catholicism.

Which brings me to the election of a Polish pope.

According to George Weigel, John Paul II was influenced by the writings of Adam Mickiewicz, and by the poets Norwid and Slowacki who are buried in Wawel Cathedral beside Mickiewicz:

Karol Wojtyla's first exposure to Polish Romanticism probably came when his father read him the famous trilogy of Henryk Sienkiewicz, in which bold knights charge back and forth across the steppes of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in violent pursuit of glory and defense of faith and fatherland...(WITNESS TO HOPE p. 33)

A great popularizer, Sienkiewicz conveyed to a mass audience several key ideas in Polish Romanticism's distinctive view of Polish history: history had a spiritual core; the deterioration of its traditional national virtues had caused Poland's political collapse; reestablishing Polish independence required recovering those virtues as the foundation of a new Polish state. Karol Wojtyla deepened his understanding of this singular way of reading history in his adolescent encounter with the great poet/dramatists of Polish Romanticism including Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Slowacki, and Cyprian Kamil Norwid....

Adam Mickiewicz insisted that history had a deep spiritual dimension in which suffering prepared the soul for glory. It was a familiar Christian theme--redemptive suffering as a personal spiritual discipline. For Mickiewicz, though, redemptive suffering as also the national destiny. Partitioned Poland was a Messiah among nations, a suffering servant whose time on Calvary would redeem the world and show it the path beyond Western materialism into a new, more spiritual form of freedom. (WITNESS, p. 34)

Like other Polish Romantics, he [Slowacki] was convinced that partitioned, suffering Poland played a unique role in the drama of world history. In Slowacki's case, this meant that the "Spirit" which had created the world and shaped each succeeding phase of history now resided in Poland....It was during his last, mystical period in his career that Slowacki wrote a poem about a "Slav Pope" who would be a "brother" to all humanity....

Karol Wojtyla memorized Pan Tadeusz [Mickiewicz's epic] and acted in Kordian [Slowacki's play], but the most influential of the Polish Romantic poets on his thought was Cyprian Kamil Norwid (1821-1883). (WITNESS, p. 35)

This enthusiasm of his youth seems to have permeated the thinking of John Paul II until his death. A travel website discussing Krakow mentions the Pope's interest in Mickiewicz:

The title gives it away. Pope John Paul II, the city's most prominent son, and Pan Tadeusz, protagonist of Adam Mickiewicz's novel by the same title, are omnipresent in Krakow.

Zenit mentions Mickiewicz in their report on the "Concert of Reconciliation".

In his "Letter to Artists", 1999, John Paul mentions Mickiewicz:

“From chaos there rises the world of the spirit”. These words of Adam Mickiewicz, written at a time of great hardship for his Polish homeland, prompt my hope for you: may your art help to affirm that true beauty which, as a glimmer of the Spirit of God, will transfigure matter, opening the human soul to the sense of the eternal.

An article from the Globe and Mail, by Michael Valpy, makes some insightful comments. Titled "The pope we never knew", Valpy writes:

He has written of "my special spiritual bond with the history of Poland." He believes that culture - far more than political ideology or economics - shapes humanity's path through history. Romantic symbols obsess him, such as the start of a new millennium, "a key to my pontificate."...

The pious Pole. He was raised by a deeply religious father ("a man of constant prayers," his son recalls) in a society where piety was, and is, normal. Poland has been described as the most intensely Catholic country in the world, and the messianic leitmotif to its literature is almost overwhelming. Its greatest Romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz, called Poland the "Christ of all nations," ordained to suffer and to be persecuted but ultimately protected by the Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland.

Another 19th-century Romantic poet, Juliusz Slowacki, foretold of a Slavic pope who would not shrink from battle, but mount the battlements and face the sword.

John Paul II, the first Slavic pope, has made startling statements about being chosen by God for suffering ("The Pope has to be attacked, the Pope has to suffer," he said after breaking his hip in 1994) and Mary's interventions to protect him from death (after the 1981 assassination attempt against him, he said: "One hand fired and another guided the bullet" - meaning Mary's hand stopped the bullet from being fatal)....

He himself engages in meditative prayer - frequently prostrate on the floor with his arms at right angles in the shape of the cross - for as much as seven hours a day, entering into what he calls his "audience with God," a world beyond language. His staff say it is his meditative powers that keep his broken body moving.

After the election of Albino Luciani, Karol Wojtyla wrote his last poem which Valpy recounts:

He went to Rome in August, 1978, to elect Albino Luciani as pope - John Paul I. Thirty-three days later, John Paul I was dead, and Karol Wojtyla sat down and wrote his last poem.

It was called Stanislaw. He wrote it, he said later, to pay "my debt to Krakow." It was about martyrdom as the source of Polish nationhood and unity and a model of the Christian vocation. George Weigel implies strongly that Karol Wojtyla knew what would happen when the cardinals next met in Rome....

This has been no accidental man, no accidental Pope. All his actions as leader of the world's one billion Catholics flow from ideas and beliefs he held before his papacy began....

He has developed a theological teaching on the separate but equal "Marian Church" of faith and disciples that makes possible the "Petrine Church" of office.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, if the author is accurate, is the account of the young Wojtyla who gathered up the Polish youth, taking them into the mountains to hike, ski and kayak. Valpy writes:

He was a lamp in the intellectual Communist gloom. He became intensely involved with their lives; he engaged them in discourse on spirituality and the innate nature of being human, on love and family life, on sex as the icon of the interior life of God.

And last but not least, Valpy points out the obvious:

He presides over a church in which the Western bloc is almost in revolt against his papacy. He was indecipherably slow to respond to the American scandal of molesting priests.

Considering the deterioration of mystical Judaism into the Sabbatian heresy, and considering the deterioration of the Mariavites, who attempted to reform the Polish church, into a sexually immoral cult, the current sexual abuse crisis is not entirely a surprise.

There is an interesting essay by Lea Sestieri on the Vatican website dedicated to "The Year of the Holy Spirit" and titled "The Jewish Roots of the Holy Spirit." In that essay you can read:

...in Jewish scripture the Holy Spirit is never presented as a person but rather as a divine power capable of transforming the human being and the world, the fact remains that Christian pneumatological terminology is rooted in that of the Jewish religion....

There will come a day when every human being will be possessed by the spirit and this day will coincide with the day of the messiah...

The outpouring of the Spirit by the Risen Lord coincides with the Hebrew feast of Pentecost, which celebrates the gift to Israel of the Covenant and the Torah. The Spirit of the Risen Lord is not the cancellation but the renewal of the Mount Sinai covenant: responsibility before man producing fruits of justice and holiness in the world....

Rabbinical thought starts with the Spirit as Spirit of Prophecy which ceases as such with Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi...and it is then recognized as charismatic inspiration and is promised to scholars. The Mishnah speaks of the spirit as something which can be attained by man though (sic) different spiritual stages...Never in rabbinical texts is the Spirit considered as an entity separate from God, even though at times it is used as synonymous with God and inter-changeable with Shekinah (majesty of God present among men and in nature; immanence.

Hebrew philosophy likens the Spirit to the rabbinical Shekinah...to the Glory of God...

The Mysticism of Rhenish Hassidism (12th - 13th century) refers again to the Glory (it is the great splendour called Shekinah and therefore identical to the Spirit of Holiness from which come the voice and the word of God). The Zohar...shows that it is thanks to the Spirit that the world was created, in as much as it is the emanation of this light, splendid and primordial point as it had already been described by the philosopher Saadia (9th century).

The Zohar. The Shekinah. These are terms from mystical Judaism. The Zohar is the source of the Jewish Kabbalah. The Zohar comes from an historical period when the Jews had already rejected Christ. It is a short step from this paper to the Pentecostal/charismatic movement.

What is this so-called "Marian Church" mentioned in the Globe and Mail article? Is it similar to the church of the Rosicrucians, and the promoters of Sophia such as Robert Powell and MEDITATIONS ON THE TAROT?

This amounts to another Gospel. The gospel of occultism, of visionary experience, of disembodied spirits. What discernment is being used? Who decides if the spirit contacted is from God? This new gospel moves away from Christ and toward the Holy Spirit as savior in the way that it is being implemented in the various websites I've linked from time to time. That may not have been JPII's intention, but we cannot overlook the fruits.

The occultism of the Paris occult revival was very much a heretical theology. How then did we come to elect a pope who was captivated by the thought of one of the major promoters of this occult theology?

Does this explain why the Masonic Lodge was not specifically mentioned in the revision of Canon Law in 1983, making it possible for the Masons to claim that Catholics are now permitted to join the Lodge? James Webb writes:

Presumably in the hope of making a good Muscovite of the refractory Pole the Russians deported Mickiewicz to St. Petersburg. This had no more effect than his imprisonment in keeping the young poet from the dangerous fruit of illuminism. When the students had been in prison (1823-4), Thomas Zan had undergone ecstatic visionary states which greatly impressed Mickiewicz. In St. Petersburg he fell under the influence of his fellow Pole, the artist, poet, and prophet Joseph Olesciewicz, who was during this period Grand Master of the Martinist Order in Russia, and from whom Mickiewicz learned the Cabala. Thus, when he left Russia, Mickiewicz carried with him a body of Traditional knowledge, acquired through his membership of an underground where rejected knowledge and rejected politics were one.

Mickiewicz learned the Cabala from a Martinist.

Jules Dionel, founder of the Gnostic Church of France, describes Martinism:

In 1895, Jules Doinel suddenly abdicated as Patriarch of the Gnostic Church, resigned from his Masonic Lodge, and converted to Roman Catholicism. Under the pseudonym "Jean Kostka," he attacked the Gnostic Church, Masonry and Martinism in a book called LUCIFER UNMASKED.

The article describes Dionel's beliefs and practices this way:

Dionel became fascinated by the drama of the Cathars and their heroic and tragic resistance against the forces of the Pope. He began to study their doctrines and those of their predecessors, the Bogomils, the Paulicians, the Manichaeans and the Gnostics. As his studies progressed, he became increasingly convinced that Gnosticism was the true religion behind Freemasonry.

One night in 1888, the "Eon Jesus" appeared to Doinel in a vision and charged him with the work of establishing a new church. He spiritually consecrated Dionel as "Bishop of Montségur and Primate of the Albigenses." After his vision of the Eon Jesus, Doinel began attempting to contact Cathar and Gnostic spirits in seances in the salon of Maria de Mariategui, Lady Caithness, Duchesse de Medina Pomar.

Doinel had long been associated with Lady Caithness, who was a prominent figure in the French Spiritist circles of the time, a disciple of Anna Kingsford, and leader of the French branch of the Theosophical Society. She considered herself a reincarnation of Mary Stuart; and interestingly, a Spiritist communication in 1881 had foreshadowed to her a revolution in religion which would result in a "New Age of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit." Doinel's Gnostic seances were attended by other notable occultists of various sects; including the Abbé Roca, an Ex-Catholic Priest and close associate of Stanislas de Guaita and Oswald Wirth. Communications from the spirits were generally received by means of a pendulum suspended by Lady Caithness over a board of letters.

At one seance, Doinel received the following communication:

"I address myself to you because you are my friend, my servant and the prelate of my Albigensian Church. I am exiled from the Pleroma, and it is I whom Valentinus named Sophia-Achamôth. It is I whom Simon Magus called Helene-Ennoia; for I am the Eternal Androgyne. Jesus is the Word of God; I am the Thought of God. One day I shall remount to my Father, but I require aid in this; it requires the supplication of my Brother Jesus to intercede for me. Only the Infinite is able to redeem the Infinite, and only God is able to redeem God. Listen well: The One has brought forth One, then One. And the Three are but One: the Father, the Word and the Thought. Establish my Gnostic Church. The Demiurge will be powerless against it. Receive the Paraclete."

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!