Mieczysław Jagłowski

The Presence of Messianism and Millenarianism in Brazilian Folk Religiosity in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, numerous unorthodox Christian religious communities sprang up in many parts of the vast Brazilian interior. Their worldview basis was the belief that the present life takes place in times of cosmic and social crisis. Waiting for the day of the Last Judgement was associated with attempts to establish a just social order, consistent with Christian norms and values. These communities were led by charismatic leaders, perceived by their participants as incarnations of saints. In this article, we ask about the circumstances and reasons for this religious and social revival, and we consider them in the perspective of the meeting of European culture with the cultures of the New World, understood as the process of creating a new, common symbolic universe.

* Artykuł przygotowany przy finansowym wsparciu Narodowego Centrum Nauki – grant nr 2017/27/B/HS1/00234. 

Artykuł dotyczy jednego z najbardziej fascynujących dzieł prozatorskich XX wieku – Księgi niepokoju Fernanda Pessoi, jednego z najwybitniejszych poetów języka portugalskiego. Niezwykłość Księgi na tym między innymi polega, że może być ona dowolnie składana z nieopublikowanych przez Pessoę 30 tysięcy fragmentów, których autorstwo przypisał on nie sobie, lecz swemu półheteronimowi (porte-parole) Bernardowi Soaresowi. W artkule podjęto dociekania dotyczące filozoficznych źródeł charakterystycznego dla twórczości Pessoi zjawiska heteronimii oraz obsesyjnego wątku Księgi – niemożności uchwycenia przez jej narratora sensu swego życia i własnej tożsamości. W tym kontekście rozważano kwestię relacji między literaturą i filozofią w obliczu modernistycznego podważenia roszczeń filozofii do prawdy i zrównania obu tych obszarów twórczości pod względem możliwości dostępu do prawdy i jej wyrażania.

Metaphysics and Literature in the Time of Untruth. On The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

The article is concerned with one of the most fascinating prose texts of the 20th century – Livro do desassossego (The Book of Disquiet) by Fernando Pessoa, one of the most prominent poets of the Portuguese language. The uniqueness of the Book, among others, is illustrated by the fact that it can be freely composed from 30,000 fragments Pessoa did not publish, but whose authorship he did not ascribe to himself, but to his half-heteronym (porte-parole), Bernardo Soares. The article explores the philosophical sources of the phenomenon of heteronymy characteristic for Pessoa’s work and the obsessive thread of the Book – the narrator’s inability to grasp the sense of his life and his own identity. In this context, the issue of relations between literature and philosophy is considered, with regard to the modernist undermining of philosophy’s claims to truth, and equating both of these areas of their creativity in terms of possibility of accessing the truth and expressing it.

* Artykuł powstał przy wsparciu Narodowego Centrum Nauki, numer grantu 2017/27/B/HS1/00234.

In the darkening Garden. Utopia and social practice of Vasco de Quiroga in the New World

The article concerns the activities of Vasco de Quiroga (1470–1565), a social reformer who, in the reality of the Spanish colonial expansion in the New World, made a pioneering, successful attempt to establish autonomous republics of indigenous peoples. With regard to his initiatives, commentators expressed both recognition and disapproval. We are convinced that the divergence between these assessments was often due to insufficient account of the socio-historical context of the groundbreaking work of the Spanish reformer. In order to make a fair assessment of it, we present the social and political determinants of Quiroga’s actions, and on the basis of the findings we engage in a polemic with the critical appraisals of his accomplishments. In the final remarks, we emphasize the magnitude of Quiroga‘s achievements, including their influence on the change of Western attitudes towards slavery.