Literature as Natural Theology? Post-secular Motifs in Andrzej Kijowski’s Late Works

Marta KWAŚNICKA

Abstract

By the end of his life, Andrzej Kijowski, literary critic and writer, returned to the practice of the Catholic faith. His inquisitiveness of a convert enabled him to advance an original theory of the relationship between literature and religion. The perspective adopted by the Polish critic was partly in line with the ideas, proposed much later, by Charles Taylor and Graham Ward. Kijowski, however, developed his views independently, drawing inspiration from the works by Józef Tischner, Christopher Dawson, and others. The author of the article analyzes Kijowski’s essays included in the collection Tropy (1986) and excerpts from his published and unpublished diaries written in the nineteen eighties, as well as notes from the same period, to reconstruct a forgotten current in the Polish Catholic literary criticism. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that Kijowski’s position was different that that taken by the Polish school of the literary theory of the sacred and that the author of Tropy in numerous ways anticipated the post-secular theories, while remaining an orthodox Catholic thinker.

This article has been prepared within the research project “Between Secularization and Reform. Religious Rationalism in the Late 17th Century and in the Enlightenment” at the Institute of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, subsidized by National Science Centre in Poland, grant no. UMO-2018/31/B/HS1/02050.