The Philosophy of Polish Messianists

by Elisabeth Wagner

World history is the process in which

the spirit of humanity evolved in sentience,

conscious awareness and bringing

the beautiful, the true and the good

into play, -

a process the necessity, fortuitousness and

freedom of which we must perceive.

                                                               (Cieszkowski)

The significant spiritual movement of  Messianism developed in Poland in the 19th century.

August Cieszkowski ( 1814 -1894) came to Berlin University as a 17-year – old student in 1831, and entered there into the world of the German classical writers and philosophers, especially Fichte, Schiller and Hegel. In 1838 he published his first book  Historiosophie ( historiosophy), in which he spoke of the three great periods in human cultural evolution:

1. The period of beauty, thesis, when human beings still communicated with the divine and spiritual. Those were the early civilizations.
2. The search for truth, antithesis. This was a period of Aristotle to Hegel.
3. The time when the essence of spirit came to living experience, synthesis. It takes hold of the will. A new strength arises which is directed towards the future. Genuine social life out of the spirit was to be the sign of this period - the period of goodness, spirit becomes social in the will.

Cieszkowski had realized that abstract philosophy had come to its high point and also its end with Hegel. He knew that in future both philosophy and art must be something entirely new, of essence and substance that extended thinking and perception in conscious sentience, inner response, and would serve ‘ also to grasp the secrets of the world’.

For him, the great movement principle which gave rise to this evolution, extending from sentient  perception to evolving thinking and fully conscious apprehension of pure powers of will, was the I (self).

In 1873 Ferdinand Trentowski’s (1808 – 1869)  Grundlage der universellen Philosophie (basis of universal philosophy) appeared in German. He spoke of three sources of knowledge and insight:

1. Learning experience with matter. The body of the universe is perceived; soul and spirit are not. This leads to fragmentation.
2. The pole of the rational mind (spirit). Inwardly it bases on synthesis and freedom, the ground and origin of all movement in the universe - but it loses sight of matter.
3. Simultaneous perception of both poles. It is the source of knowledge which gives universal certainty. It alone leads to true, all-round insight. In it, the two poles fuse to become a single light, ‘in which reality – this constellation of the philosophical heavens - is shining.’ This reality is perceived to be trinal.

For Trentowski, simultaneous perception of inner and outer laws is as clear as the perception of objects around one. Thinking is a spiritual sense organ to him. He thus spoke of perceptive philosophy, which alone he considered to be Christian.

The Polish Messianists saw trinality to be the basis of all existence and evolution. Rudolf Steiner counted them among the most significant minds of the 19th century, forerunners of anthroposophy. In his Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Occult Science and all his works we find answer to and fulfillment seeking, the endeavour, the presentiment of a new revelation to come of the spirit that would encompass the whole of human and cosmic life. A synthesis of

truth, – beauty – and goodness,

science, - art  - and religion,

spirit, - soul – and body.

Fundamental insight into the  ‘trinity’ of the human being as image of divine creative powers – archetype of all existence and evolution – opens up a new cosmic dimension for extended thinking and this is ordained also to encompass the secrets of the world.