Jester and the Priest," expressing his preference for the former. He developed a deep interest in the religious dimension of human experience in general and in the Christian base of European civilization in particular.

In 1965 he published in Polish a monumental study that he had been working on since 1958: Religious Consciousness and the Church: Studies in 17th Century Non-denominational Christianity. (It has been translated into French, but not yet -- like many of his other major writings -- into English.) In this work, he brought to life a vast array of little-known thinkers from all over Europe who embraced Christian ideas, but radically rejected affiliation with any existing church. In opposition to the Church's "law," they all favored a religion of direct "grace." The research for thisbook led him deeper into the mystical mode of knowing and confirmed his distaste for institutionalized "truth" -- taken then to mean statist Marxism more than dogmatic Catholicism. His many writings on religion suggest the validity of the continuing quest for transcendent answers along with the near certainty that absolute answers are unobtainable in philosophy and dangerous in politics. His 1973 lecture, "The Revenge of the Sacred on Secular Culture," contends that the sacred is essential for culture as an ordering structure.

He deals with deep questions in a non-didactic and often ironic and gently self-mocking way in the treatises "If there is no God: on God, the Devil, Sin and other Worries in the So-called Philosophy of Religion" (1988). In his, God Owes Us Nothing (1985), he reflects