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RACOVIA

The year 2005 marks the 400th anniversary of the Racovian Catechism, perhaps the most widely influential Unitarian document in history, causing consternation in conventional religious circles for many decades after it first appeared. It was produced in the little town of Raków (Racovia), today an unremarkable place in the depths of the Polish countryside, but at that time famous as the Unitarian capital of Europe. Its printing press issued hundreds of titles, most of them in Latin, which meant that they could and did find a place in the libraries of leading thinkers all across the continent.. It also boasted an academy whose high standards drew students and faculty from many countries and gave the town the additional title of 'the Sarmatian Athens'.

Poland, known during that period as the 'asylum of heretics', provided a remarkably tolerant environment for radicals who in many other countries would have been burned at the stake or suffered in the widespread wars of religion. Consequently, it drew many refugees, a large number of whom were well-educated Italians. The most prominent of these was Faustus Socinus, after whom the whole Unitarian movement was for more than two centuries popularly called 'Socinian'. The Racovian Catechism embodied his thinking, though he died a year before its publication.

Though Socinus was hospitably received in Raków, the town had been founded by Poles a decade before he arrived. The original intention was that it would be a Utopian community democratically organized, with material possessions owned in common. This proved a failure among the individualistic Poles, but it gave place to a center not only for the theological debates that made it famous, but also for progressive thinking on such subjects as capital punishment and participation in war. Its broad humane spirit has been widely recognized as one of the sources of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, although by the time of that flowering of the human spirit Raków itself had succumbed to the forces of religious repression. None the less, in a present-day world which offers many parallels to the concerns for which practical answers were sought four centuries ago, the story of this early community can be an inspiring one.