Literature as Natural Theology? Post-secular Motifs in Andrzej Kijowski’s Late Works
Marta KWAŚNICKA
Instytut Literatury, ul. Smoleńsk 20/12, 31-112 Kraków, Poland , Polandhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-8523-234X
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, how
ever, 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from his published and unpublished diaries written in the nineteen eighties, as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.
Keywords:
post-secularism, Catholicism, Andrzej Kijowski, literary criticism, religionInstytut Literatury, ul. Smoleńsk 20/12, 31-112 Kraków, Poland https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8523-234X
