The Judgment of Peter and Paul on Olympus

The Judgment of Peter and Paul on Olympus is a short work by Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Polish novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905 and who is now most famous for Quo Vadis and for the Trilogy of historical novels about seventeenth century Poland. This shorter piece belongs to the strand of Sienkiewicz’s work in which he used classical and biblical settings to explore religious and philosophical questions, the same vein that produced Quo Vadis at greater length.

The central conceit of the piece is the meeting suggested by the title. The two great apostles of the early church, Peter and Paul, are imagined as appearing before the assembled gods of classical Olympus to deliver some kind of judgment, or perhaps to receive judgment, on the meeting of the two religious worlds that dominated the Mediterranean in the first centuries of the Christian era. Sienkiewicz uses the imagined scene to think about the long historical encounter between paganism and Christianity, an encounter that had occupied him while he was writing Quo Vadis and that he kept returning to in shorter works through the rest of his career.

The writing has the elevated symbolic quality that Sienkiewicz brought to his religious pieces, more formal than the sharp realism of his Polish village stories and closer to the manner of his historical romances. There is some pleasure in seeing the classical and Christian worlds set side by side and made to speak to each other, and Sienkiewicz had read enough in both traditions to handle the dialogue with care.

The piece is short, perhaps thirty pages, and works as a single sitting read. For readers interested in Sienkiewicz’s religious and philosophical thinking outside the famous historical novels, this is one of the better short pieces to look at. It pairs naturally with Quo Vadis, which extends the same questions at much greater length, and with the shorter philosophical pieces collected variously in his shorter works editions. It also reads well next to the philosophical short fiction of his contemporaries, particularly the religious tales of Tolstoy from the same period.