Kazimierz Łyszczyński

Life, trial, and execution

Kazimierz Łyszczyński was a nobleman, landowner, philosopher, and soldier in the service of the Sapieha family. For eight years he studied philosophy as a Jesuit and then became a supply judge (podsędek) in legal cases against the Jesuits concerning estates.

Łyszczyński had read a book by Henry Aldsted entitled Theologia Naturalis, which attempted to prove the existence of divinity. But its arguments were so confused that Łyszczyński was able to infer many contradictions. Ridiculing Aldsted, Łyszczyński wrote in the book's margins the words "ergo non est Deus" ("therefore God does not exist").

This was discovered by one of Łyszczyński's debtors, Jan Kazimierz Brzoska, who was the nuncio of Brest in Poland or a Stolnik of Bracławice or Łowczy of Brześć. Brzoska, reluctant to return a great sum of money to him lent by Łyszczyński, accused the latter of being an atheist and gave the aforementioned work as evidence to Witwicki, bishop of Poznań. Brzoska also stole and delivered to the court a handwritten copy of De non existentia Dei, which was the first Polish philosophical treatise presenting reality from an atheistic perspective, and which Łyszczyński had been working on since 1674. Witwicki along with Załuski, bishop of Kiev, took up this case with zeal. The King attempted to help Łyszczyński by ordering that he should be judged at Vilna, but this could not save Łyszczyński from the clergy. Łyszczyński's first privilege as a Polish noble, that he could not be imprisoned before his condemnation, was violated. The Łyszczyński case was brought before the diet of 1689 where he was accused of having denied the existence of God and having blasphemed against the Virgin Mary and the saints. He was condemned to death for atheism. The sentence was carried out before noon in the Old Town Market in Warsaw, where his tongue was pulled out followed by a beheading. After that, his corpse was transported beyond the city borders and cremated.

Bishop Załuski gave the following account of the execution:

After recantation the culprit was conducted to the scaffold, where the executioner tore with a burning iron the tongue and the mouth, with which he had been cruel against God; after which his hands, the instruments of the abominable production, were burnt at a slow fire, the sacrilegious paper was thrown into the flames; finally himself, that monster of his century, this deicide was thrown into the expiatory flames; expiatory if such a crime may be atoned for.

De non existentia Dei

Łyszczyński wrote a treatise entitled "De non existentia Dei" (the non-existence of God), which stated that God does not exist and that religions are the inventions of man.

On the basis of a public accusation, a trial at the front of the Sejm Commission was conducted. There is an actual transcript of the proceedings in a Library of Kórnik, including a speech by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania Instigator Regni Szymon Kurowicz Zabistowski, in which he cited fragments of De non existentia Dei. The treatise itself was destroyed by the diet but the cited fragments that survived are as follows:

I - we beseech you, o' theologians, by your God, if in this manner do you not extinguish the light of Reason, do you not oust the sun from this world, do you not pull down your God from the sky, when attributing him the impossible, the characteristics and attributes contradicting themselves.II - the Man is a creator of God, and God is a concept and creation of a Man. Hence the people are architects and engineers of God and God is not a true being, but a being existing only within mind, being chimeric by its nature, because a God and a chimera are the same.III - Religion was constituted by people without religion, so they could be worshipped although the God is not existent. Piety was introduced by the unpietic. The fear of God was spread by the unafraid so that the people were afraid of them in the end. Devotion named godly is a design of Man. Doctrine, be it logical or philosophical, bragging to be teaching the truth of God, is false, and on the contrary, the one condemned as false, is the very true one.IV - simple folk are cheated by the more cunning with the fabrication of God for their own oppression; whereas the same oppression is shielded by the folk in a way, that if the wise attempted to free them by the truth, they would be quelled by the very people.V - nevertheless we do not experience within us and within any other such an imperative of reason, which would ensure us of a truth of divine revelation. Alas if they were present in us, then everyone would have to acknowledge them and would have no doubts and would not contradict the Writings of Moses and the Gospels - which is not true - and there would be no different congregations and their followers as Mahomet etc. Such an imperative is not known and there are not only doubts, but there are some who deny a revelation, and they are not fools, but wise men, who with a proper reasoning prove what? the very contrary, what I also prove here. Concluding, that God does not exist".

During his trial, Łyszczyński claimed that the work was to be about a Catholic and an atheist having a debate, in which the Catholic would eventually win (he told the diet that the work would have had a different title from De non existentia Dei). The atheist was to speak first followed by the Catholic. He claimed that he only wrote the first half of the work (that is only the atheist's argument) and then stopped writing at the advice of a priest.

Status in modern Poland

Regardless of whether Łyszczyński was genuinely an atheist, in communist Poland he came to be celebrated as a martyr of the atheist cause. In a series of papers, Andrzej Nowicki presented a romanticized view of Łyszczyński, stating that "in terms of breadth of intellectual horizons, the thoroughness of philosophical erudition and the boldness of thought, he was beyond doubt the most eminent Polish mind of the epoch."

In March 2014, his persona and ideas were the key theme in a public performance during the 2014 Procession of Atheists in Poland.