Easter's Essence: A Journey Through Faith & History with Zbigniew Mikołejko

zbigniew_mikolejko_fot_aw.jpg, default, Zbigniew Mikołejko, photo: Dawid Żuchowicz / Agencja Wyborcza

Professor Zbigniew Mikołejko, a philosopher, essayist and historian of ideas, passed away at the age of 72 on 15 April 2024. We here recall the interview that Professor Mikołejko gave to Culture.pl in the spring of 2023. We talk with Professor Zbigniew Mikołejko, a philosopher and religious scholar, head of the Department of Religious Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, on the sources and meaning of Easter in the past and today, during the war in Ukraine.

Julia Marczyńska: I would like to ask you, Professor, about the essence of Easter. We see the external manifestations of this holiday, Easter eggs and lambs, and we also know its history. But what is the essence of Easter?

Zbigniew Mikołejko: I would not disregard these external tokens, although they are of course a kind of transfiguration – lending a rather tacky, I would say, and illusory shape to what is hidden deep down and has a spiritual dimension. Somewhere there, therefore, towards the interior, towards the ‘essence’, is where these tokens lead. At the same time, a kind of ‘historicity’ of view is also necessary, because when we speak of Easter we are wandering into the circle of something that is the oldest and most important holiday of Christianity. And what for a long time, until perhaps the beginning of the 4th but certainly until the 3rd century, was its only holiday – independently of the diversity of churches, views, practices (all this was still unformed at that time, just being born in disputes and sometimes dramatic events).

Above all, however, it is a holiday that emerged from the Jewish holiday of Passover, treated as a holiday of the freedom of the spirit, as a holiday of liberation, of leaving Egyptian enslavement. Of course, Christianity took some elements from there, including the basic message, as a holiday of liberation from evil and death, but a spiritual one, not a physical one, as the current patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, says.

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Something else of importance should be added here – namely, until other Christian holidays appeared, Easter constituted a symbolic and ritualistic concentration of the history of salvation, as if a sum and abbreviation of its history. Later, with the emergence of subsequent Christian holidays, such a concentration was somewhat forgotten, limited or transformed – I’m looking for the right word – in favour of something that could be called the dispersion of the history of salvation or, to avoid any negative associations, the distribution of the history of salvation contained in Jesus Christ into various time segments rooted in the Gospel accounts of his life and teaching. As a result, in short, this transfer of the story of the Saviour to the annual cycle was connected with a certain weakening of the spiritual ‘density’ of Easter as a holiday of salvation, liberation from sin and death, but, as I mentioned, not in the physical dimension (in his great hymn on the resurrection, contained in the First Letter to the Corinthians, St Paul speaks of a ‘spiritual body’ and a ‘glorious body’ and that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable’).

JM: So the essence of this holiday is liberation from death…

ZM: Exactly, but in the sense indicated here. Here we need to return to certain theological disputes that took place in early Christianity and that ended quite quickly – namely, in the second century in Ephesus, in the Christian East, the so-called Quartodeciman appeared, which claimed that Christians should celebrate their Passover on the fourteenth day after the Jewish Passover, regardless of what day of the week it was. The Roman or Alexandrian concept, on the other hand, says that it should be the first Sunday after the Jewish Passover. This distinction is important because the Quartodeciman approach focuses on the death of Jesus, making it the means of saving faith. The second position, which ultimately prevails in Christianity – in the 4th century no one is talking about the Quartodeciman anymore – focuses on the resurrection. In both cases, however, the date of celebration is linked to the date of the Jewish Passover celebrated according to the lunar calendar (hence the strange Easter holiday mobility for modern Christians). But within Easter there are also other signs of this immersion in the Jewish Passover tradition…

JM: Can we say that it was from the Jewish tradition that the lamb came to us?

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Easter lambs, photo: Bartosz Krupa / East News

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ZM: Yes, it is about the sacrificial lamb… Jesus now becomes this lamb, martyred and crucified, although, of course, in accordance with what you said, already highly commercialized and often ‘washed out’ of its spiritual depth in today’s holiday practice. This lamb is a completely different being. With no sacrificial features, just gentleness, whiteness, hominess… It is pastoral, idyllic, right? Here, however, it was precisely about the commemoration of the Exodus and – until the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE – eating the lamb during the Seder supper and so on. For Christians, on the other hand, Christ is the sacrificial Lamb, ‘the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world’. However, the Gospel message is no longer a pure message from apostolic times but is already filtered through the later experiences of Christians, through the growing sense of separateness, difference from what is Jewish over time. Yes, it is still the Feast of Unleavened Bread, but – as early Christian authors emphasize – it is now ‘ours’.

In the case of Easter, if we are to take it seriously, our thoughts revolve around those basic elements that I mentioned in the dispute about when to celebrate Easter. So should we focus on death or on the Resurrection? Both Western Christianity, Catholic or Protestant, in its basic trends, and Orthodox Christianity, Eastern, strongly emphasize the act of Resurrection. Yes, especially the Eastern one, it has always deeply moved me… all the more so because Polish Catholicism is rather Christmas oriented [laughs], a bit unorthodox in a way. So we prefer to immerse ourselves in the joy of Christmas and its inherent joys and delights, in its light and in its hope – forgetting that Christmas as a holiday also carries within itself the signs of the suffering and death of Jesus and his resurrection. Each of the important Christian holidays tells this story, for that matter.

In Eastern Orthodoxy, it is very visible when there’s this knocking with a cross on the gate: it is somewhat akin to opening the tomb of Jesus, a liturgical reconstruction of pulling away Christ’s tombstone. On the other hand, there is also the epitaphios, which is connected with the memory of death because it is a shroud…

JM: I know that Easter traditions also have pagan elements.

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Polish Easter eggs, photo: Andrzej Sidor / Forum

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ZM: Exactly. It must be said clearly, after all, that Easter did not appear on pure, untainted religious and cultural ground. It was born on old foundations – there were no others – of what was pre-Christian, pagan, as polytheism is sometimes called in an unkind way. In our Eastern or Central European area, Easter therefore overlaps with the spring festival of the dead, with what is called small Forefathers’ Eve [małe Dziady], the ones that Mickiewicz talks about, because he seems to be talking about these, not the autumn ones. It’s a holiday in honour of ‘dziady’, or ancestors, during which their spirits appear and during which they must be soothed and satisfied. But at the same time, it’s a festival of spring fertility and birth to a new life. We have many tokens of this today. Even the egg, which is an archaic image of both the cosmos and rebirth and a reminder that these Easter eggs were placed close to the bosoms of our deceased ‘grandfathers’, our deceased loved ones, in pre-Christian times.

Then there are various elements associated with spring. After all, it’s a transition from winter, associated in our cultural circle with death (please look at Marceli Harasimowicz’s canvas Prey of Ravens [Zdobycz kruków] from 1888 hanging in the Lviv Art Gallery), to the time of nature’s rebirth. And the human being is a part of this, which is strongly expressed by old cultures through their rituals, which we at this point remember poorly. So we have reminiscences of various fertility rituals or customs, such as Śmigus Dyngus – pouring water on girls on Easter Monday, which is the equivalent of, I would say, a rather erotic situation, related to fertilization and reproduction. This is very archaic thinking… After all, Thales, the first of our philosophers, who was still living in the realm of myth, said that everything that lives needs water to grow, to procreate, to multiply. Of course, this later became covered with various social or ritual filters.

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Śmigus Dyngus, Bukowina Tatrzańska, photo: Adrian Gładecki / Reporter / East News

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The foundation of Easter, however, is of course its Jewish subsoil, with the basic idea of spiritual liberation and in general of any liberation, any freedom. I think this should have particular resonance these days because we are now in a well of darkness. Evil has grown stronger and revealed its degenerate, most cruel form in Ukraine. Today, as we speak, is the anniversary of the liberation of Bucha, that is, the discovery – precisely during the paschal period – of this whole criminal horror [pause]… This stands before our eyes and will not stop appearing. And I’m not even talking about Ukrainians, for whom this is a horror that is unimaginable from my point of view, but about that more sensitive part of the world… And yet it is real, hellishly real, as if the gates of the abyss had opened up, to use biblical language.

JM: Professor, you mentioned my countrymen. What is Easter during war?

ZM: The Easter story, the Gospel one – let’s stick to it, without going into details – is a story for everyone, for believers and non-believers, for Catholics, Protestants, the Eastern Orthodox… in the sense that it speaks precisely of universal experiences, which of course also have their historical shape. Yes, there was one Passover of Christ, but it is constantly reiterated through repetition in time, in the annual cycle and throughout the duration of Christianity. And therefore it grows into different moments, into different historical experiences. Evil, of course, does its thing. The expectation, certainly, that our dead, our fallen, our martyred will rise again here and now is an illusion. This will unfortunately not happen, but those who believe can think about their resurrection in spirit. Those who are not religious can also talk about spirit, only placed not in the realm of faith… [pause] but somewhere… Maybe in the realm of heroism and its memory… I don’t know, I can’t find the words, they all sound too pathetic and false…

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Orthodox Easter 2022 on the front line, 128th Independent Transcarpathian Assault Brigade, photo: Transcarpathian Assault Brigade / Wikimedia.org

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Muscovite Russia, I will say it outright, despite being so terrible, so destructive, so monstrous in its actions, so murderous, is suffering defeat despite this overwhelming force. First of all because Ukrainians have this heroic, somewhat mystical spirit within them but also because all this speaks to others besides to Ukrainians, to those who have some moral fibre, some ethical fibre, some reasonable sensitivity within them.

And something else. It is so dramatic, laced with blood… terrible… And it will not be otherwise, it has never been otherwise in history: Ukrainians becoming a conscious and COMPLETE nation, one about whose existence and identity there is no longer any doubt. The nails of Ukraine’s cross are, for me – and not only for me – not the nails in a coffin but the nails of salvation, liberation, freedom. These are not signs of a futile death. I know that I am saying this pathetically, but it’s impossible to say it not pathetically, impossible to say it differently.

JM: Do we, Ukrainians, have the right to be happy today, knowing that terrible things are happening close by?

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‘Christmas Eve in Siberia’ by Jacek Malczewski, 1892, photo: National Museum in Kraków

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ZM: There is a painting by Jacek Malczewski, Wigilia na Syberii [Christmas Eve in Siberia] (Jacek Kaczmarski composed a beautiful song based on this painting). The people depicted there are exiles, living in enslavement, in a foreign, unfeeling land. They also have behind them the awareness of the defeat of the 1863 uprising, and of murder and destruction; they suffer and die in a terrible way… And yet there is bread on the table and the breaking of this bread…

Because what we need is to have a structure of salvation, because the actions of the enemy, this great imperial Satan, Lucifer, who put on an angelic mask, consist in taking everything away from us, including the last remnants of hope. I can refer here to my own experiences, to the period of martial law in Poland. It was also a dramatic moment connected with trauma and death, with shooting at workers. It was similar, as I also remember, to what preceded it, in December 1970, when there were hundreds of dead and blood on the snow. And a terrible, overwhelming sadness. Before Christmas in both cases is when it happened (martial law was introduced on 13 December 1981). And despite everything, we celebrated. And Ukrainians should do the same. Because this devil, this collective Putin, wants to deprive them of this very thing. He wants the people he murders and enslaves, whose homes and whole lives he destroys, to live in absolute darkness, without a shred of hope – then they will truly be defeated. I’m saying this because both of our nations carry the burden of similar things, despite various differences and mutual wounds, in our historical but also personal memories. And what unites us – we are now rediscovering this, despite past dramatic conflicts between us (which of course cannot be underestimated) – is an obvious shared community of fate.

Translated by Michał Pelczar

Language English

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