This consideration of some approaches to the relationship between literature and religion in what Charles Taylor termed “a secular age” is written from a Polish-English “border perspective.” It takes account especially of the work of Nicholas Boyle, Michael Edwards, David Jasper and Kevin Hart; but its inspiration derives from the opening line of William Blake’s poem Auguries of Innocence, both in the original and in the Polish translation by Zygmunt Kubiak. The analysis of this one line suggests some elements of a possible approach to “literature and religion,” especially but not only in a “secular age.” The combination of the original and the translated versions implies an ideal: to appreciate the mystery of every “grain of sand” as a separate, individual world (“a world”) and at the same time to relate that particular wealth to the whole, discovering the world (“świat”) in that grain of sand. This is clearly an impossible ideal, but one that is worth pursuing in the humble spirit also implied by the poem’s opening quatrain. 

The text illustrates the changes in representations of the Invisible in religious poetry: the crisis of language caused by the rejection of the idea of the Logos in Western culture leads to the obscuring of the symbolic transparency present in the sacred art created in the medieval and early modern period. The traditional animal imagery used in the past to illustrate the mysteries of the faith is replaced in twentieth-century poetry by opaque representations of the non-human face of God. The argument is illustrated by reference to the “speaking” and simultaneously “mute” pictures in the poetry of T.S. ­Eliot and the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas. The poems of Thomas, which reveal clear traces of apo­phatic theology, can be viewed as a response to the challenges of the post-secular age. 

The subject of the present analysis are Adam Zagajewski’s early works, written in the 1970s: the books of poems Komunikat, Sklepy mięsne and List, the novel Ciepło, zimno, the short story Boże Ciało, the critical literary texts, and finally, a little known essay W kilku punktach, published under the pen name Jan Garlicz. An attempt was made at the postsecular interpretation of these texts with particular emphasis on the analysis of the different from the author’s later works attitude toward language and the Christian symbolism. In the offered rendition a significant topic and the irreducible context turns out to be the question of the possibility of non-religious, creative use of the Christian heritage by the secularized members of the Polish People’s Republic society. In the final parts of the article Zagajewski’s theses were extended to the works of the other members of the Generation ’68, represented here primarily by the articles of S. Barańczak, and confronted with the Polish tradition of the studies on the relationship between literature and religion.

This article discusses Józef Wittlin’s literary exploration of the idea of modern sainthood. It argues that Wittlin’s search for a new model of saintly life that would respond to the modern age was informed by the ongoing theological debates about the meaning and value of traditional hagiography. The article demonstrates that Wittlin’s reflections were inspired by Paul Sabatier’s influential study Vie de saint François d’Assise (Life of Saint Francis of Assisi), and informed by the immediate socio-political context (the Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918–1919 and the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe). Ultimately, Wittlin’s writings reinvent Saint Francis as a modern-day saint who shows a radical empathy with the persecu­ted and the marginalised, above all the Jews. Responding to growing anti-Semitism that was endorsed by a number of nationalist and Roman Catholic groups, Wittlin reimagines Saint Francis as a social activist who gives active attention to the suffering of the vilified “other” who has been rejected by mainstream society.

How it came that he developed so strong a bond with that inconspicuouscorner of the provinces which was in no way predestined to play any role in the life and work of the young Parisian? The biographers don’t mention any earlier connections of the Bernanos family with the northern France, today named Région Hauts-de-France. Now, it is against the backdrop of these landscapes, remembered from childhood, that he fights persistently with the widespread belief about the easy and quiet life under the wing of church. He also doesn’t hesitate to show what the torments of self-criticism and doubt consist in. Inherent personality traits of the Bernanos’s characters are their inner unrest and the unbearable dilemmas of the soul. The individuals which appear in the Bernanos’s novels aren’t only the exceptional ones in a good or bad sense of the word – the saint heroes facing up the messengers of Satan. There are also bizarre human figures, ridiculous and frigid, indifferent to the fate of the others. Yes, but the spiritual evolution of the writer himself doesn’t resemble a harmonious, steadily ascending curve. In his life there are many falls, disasters, and above all, bitter disillusions. Isn’t his work, in the same degree as his life, simply an escape from temptations of a comfortable realism and cynicism preying on human ignorance and gullibility? Certainly, in this question, rather than in the answer, is contained the sense of the message which emerges for us after so many years from the written in a nervous script, austere Bernanos’s books