Walerian Krasiński Quotes

Count Walerian Skorobohaty Krasiński or Valerian Krasinski was a Polish Calvinist politician, nationalist and historian.

Krasinski was a Polish aristocrat in exile after the November Uprising 1830, during the Austrian, German and Russian partition of Poland. In 1844, he was proposed for a chair in Slavonic Studies at Oxford University. In 1848, he presented appeals to the Habsburg government. In Russia and Europe, or, The probable consequences of the present war he wrote on the Crimean War.

Krasinski's Historical sketch of the rise, progress, and decline of the Reformation in Poland still one of main texts on the subject available in English, was written in English. One of Krasinski's main sources is Slavonia reformata by Andreas Vengerscius.He died in Edinburgh and is buried in the Warriston Cemetery close to another Polish exile, the violinist and composer Feliks Janiewicz, one of the co-organisers of the first Edinburgh Festival. The grave is marked by a tall grey granite obelisk. It lies in the overgrown area to the south-west, around 50m east of the more accessible monument to Horatio McCulloch. Wikipedia

✵ 1795 – 22. November 1855

“The use of pictures was creeping into the church already in the third century, because the council of Elvira in Spain, held in 305, especially forbids to have any picture in the Christian churches. These pictures were generally representations of some events, either of the New or of the Old Testament, and their object was to instruct the common and illiterate people in sacred history, whilst others were emblems, representing some ideas connected with the doctrines of Christianity. It was certainly a powerful means of producing an impression upon the senses and the imagination of the vulgar, who believe without reasoning, and admit without reflection; it was also the most easy way of converting rude and ignorant nations, because, looking constantly on the representations of some fact, people usually end by believing it. This iconographic teaching was, therefore, recommended by the rulers of the church, as being useful to the ignorant, who had only the understanding of eyes, and could not read writings. Such a practice was, however, fraught with the greatest danger, as experience has but too much proved. It was replacing intellect by sight. Instead of elevating man towards God, it was bringing down the Deity to the level of his finite intellect, and it could not but powerfully contribute to the rapid spread of a pagan anthropomorphism in the church.”

Walerian Krasiński

Introductory dissertation to John Calvin's Treatise on Relics (1854)