Preserving the Sacred

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By

MY CORRECT VIEWS

ON EVERYTHING

By Leszek Kolakowski

St. Augustine's, $32,

284 pages

Leszek Kolakowski is not a name familiar to Americans, but it should be. No one has done more to define the evils that communism has visited on mankind than Mr. Kolakowski, a Polish philosopher who now lives in Oxford, England. Nor has any other living author written with greater depth and precision about the dangers faced by the modern world in its often welcoming embrace of nihilism and moral relativism.

In his more than 30 books and 400 essays, Mr. Kolakowski, a former communist, has developed a body of work over five decades that defends tradition and religion as essential to a life lived fully. He accuses secularism, that all-powerful force in Western civilization, of undermining or destroying much that is valuable and irreplaceable in our culture. And he writes eloquently about everyone's need for the sacred in their lives, a basic human need Mr. Kolakowski sees the modern world doing its best to deny, even bring an end to.

Born in Radom, Poland, in 1927, Mr. Kolakowski as a teenager experienced Poland's invasion and occupation by Hitler's army. Along with others, he helped hide Polish Jews from Nazi roundup. He earned a doctorate in philosophy after the war and joined the Communist Party, becoming in his own words an orthodox Marxist.

But that orthodoxy did not last, nor did the Marxism. By 1953, when Stalin died, Mr. Kolakowski was chafing at the bit. Three years later, in 1956, he wrote a short, satiric attack on communism called "What Is Socialism?" which found itself immediately banned in Poland, but began to circulate underground, where that essay and other of Mr. Kolakowski's works formed the intellectual and spiritual underpenning of the Polish anti-communist movement. They also got him kicked out of the Communist Party, cost him his teaching job and led to his immigration to the West.