Polish Brethren

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 22nd of January 1556, a Polish student named Piotr of Goniądz stood up at the general synod of the Reformed Calvinist churches of Poland and did something almost unthinkable. He spoke out against the doctrine of the Trinity. The room was in a village called Secemin, and the audience was his own fellow Protestants. What followed from that single act of dissent was a church, a university, a printing press, an exile, and a chain of intellectual influence that would eventually reach John Locke, Isaac Newton, and the founders of the United States. The group that grew from Piotr's challenge called themselves simply the Brethren. Others called them Arians, or Socinians, or heretics. They carried wooden swords instead of steel ones. They refused to hold political office. They believed in the separation of church and state at a time when that idea was radical enough to get a church dissolved by act of parliament. How did a nontrinitarian Protestant church in sixteenth-century Poland shape the thinking of the Enlightenment? And what happened to the people inside it when the state finally moved against them?

• 2. A Church Born from Debate

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  Piotr of Goniądz's speech at Secemin did not immediately produce a new church. For nearly a decade, the argument he had started churned through synods and theological debates inside the Reformed movement. In 1565, the Polish king Sigismund II Augustus himself called a theological debate, hoping to pull the two Protestant factions back together. It failed. The group that had defended Piotr's arguments broke definitively from the Calvinists and organised their own synod on the 10th of June, 1565, in the town of Brzeziny. That synod marked the birth of the Minor Reformed Church of Poland, or Ecclesia Minor.

  Inside the new church, disagreement did not end. Through the 1570s, two distinct camps pulled against each other. One was the pacifist and Arian group, led by Marcin Czechowic and Grzegorz Paweł z Brzezin. The other was the non-pacifist and Ebionite group, led by the Belarusian Symon Budny. These were not trivial differences; they touched on questions of warfare, of baptism, and of the precise nature of Christ.

  Into this contested space, in 1579, arrived an Italian exile named Fausto Sozzini. He applied for admission to the Ecclesia Minor and was refused. His objection to water baptism was too unusual for the church to formally accept. Yet the Brethren recognised his talent as a debater. Sozzini proved his worth by answering Symon Budny's arguments effectively. His marriage in 1586 to the daughter of Krzysztof Morsztyn Sr. deepened his ties to the community. He remained among the Polish Brethren without ever formally joining them.

• 3. Raków and the Press

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  The town of Raków became the intellectual heart of the Minor Church. It housed the main Arian printing press, and in 1602 the Racovian Academy opened there, formally known as the Gymnasium Bonarum Artium. Over the decades of its operation before its closure in 1638, the Academy trained more than a thousand students. The town of Pińczów served as the other major cultural centre.

  The name "Socinian" by which the church became known abroad came not from any active leadership role by Fausto Sozzini, but from what happened to his writings after his death. His grandson Andrzej Wiszowaty Sr. published those writings in Amsterdam roughly a century after Sozzini's arrival in Poland. That Amsterdam publication, more than any personal authority Sozzini had exercised in his lifetime, fixed his name to the movement in the eyes of English readers.

  The church's theology drew early inspiration from the writings of Michael Servetus. It rejected the Trinity, it rejected Hell as a doctrine, and it rejected capital punishment as acceptable practice. These were positions that put the Brethren at odds not only with the Catholic Church but with most Protestant churches as well. Their adherents refused military service, declined political office, and were known for carrying wooden swords rather than the steel szablas that Polish custom nearly required.

• 4. Exile and Dispersion

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  The Minor Church had never joined the Sandomierz Agreement of 1570, the compact that had drawn different Polish Protestant groups together. That exclusion left it without allies when the political climate shifted. The wars of the mid-seventeenth century, collectively called the Deluge, saw Protestant Sweden invade Poland. Non-Catholic Christians, including the Brethren, were widely suspected of collaboration with the Swedish enemy. On the 20th of July, 1658, the Polish Sejm dissolved the Minor Church and expelled the Socinians from Poland.

  The exiles scattered in three directions. Some went to the Duchy of Prussia, where Krzysztof Crell-Spinowski and his sons founded new congregations. Others went to the Netherlands, where Andrzej Wiszowaty Sr. published the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum quos Unitarios vocant in 1668, and where Christopher Sand published the Bibliotheca antitrinitariorum in 1684. A third group went to Transylvania, where the Unitarian Church already enjoyed legal freedom. Andrzej Wiszowaty Jr. took that path and became a teacher at the Unitarian College in Kolozsvár, the city known today as Cluj in Romania.

  It was after their expulsion that the Brethren adopted the label "Unitarians" for themselves, a name that captured the core of their rejection of Trinitarian doctrine.

• 5. Influence Across Europe

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  John Locke and Pierre Bayle, two of the defining philosophers of the Enlightenment, were both shaped by the works the Polish Brethren carried into exile with them. The Brethren were never a large church, but their ideas on tolerance and rational religion circulated through the books published in Amsterdam and through the networks of thinkers who read them.

  Isaac Newton met Samuel Crell, the son of Johannes Crellius, of the Spinowski family. Newton collected many books from the Racovian Academy and was well informed about developments in Poland. The Englishman John Biddle translated two works by Przypkowski, along with the Racovian Catechism and a work by Joachim Stegmann. Biddle's followers maintained close relations with the Crellius family. Samuel Przypkowski had anticipated Locke on the question of tolerance by a few decades, and Andrzej Wiszowaty had written on rational religion before Locke made it famous.

  The main ideologues within Poland had been Piotr z Goniądza, Grzegorz Paweł z Brzezin, and Marcin Czechowic. Outside Poland, Johannes Crellius from Germany and Johann Ludwig von Wolzogen who came from Austria were better known to foreign readers. Among the adherents were the writers and poets Zbigniew Morsztyn, Olbrycht Karmanowski, and Wacław Potocki, as well as Mikołaj Sienicki and Jan Niemojewski.

• 6. The American Thread

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  The Unitarian current that the Polish Brethren set in motion did not stop at the borders of Europe. Joseph Priestley, who had emigrated to the United States, carried the tradition with him. He was a friend of both James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson sometimes attended services at Priestley's congregation in Philadelphia. Priestley was well informed about the Polish developments, and mentioned Socinus and Szymon Budny, translator of the Bible and author of many pamphlets against the Trinity, by name.

  The expulsion of 1658 is sometimes read as the beginning of the end of Poland's famous tradition of religious tolerance. That framing is not quite right. The decline had started earlier, and it ended later. The last non-Catholic deputy was removed from the Polish parliament at the beginning of the eighteenth century, decades after the Brethren were gone. The Brethren's expulsion was a milestone in that longer erosion, not its start or its finish.

  In the modern era, the priest Karol Grycz-Śmiałowski attempted a revival in Kraków in 1937, founding what he described as a reconstitution of the Church of Polish Brethren. During the People's Republic of Poland, the group was registered in 1967 under the name Unity of Polish Brethren, or Jednota Braci Polskich. The Atlanta Bible College of the Church of God General Conference continues to publish a journal devoted to research into the Polish Brethren and related groups.