and other poems, Milosz chides ‘‘sweet theolo-
gians’’ whose rarified proof texts are so much
straw in the face of human agony.
The magnificent recent poem ‘‘Prayer’’ says
flatly that Jesus’ ‘‘suffering /... cannot save the
world from pain.’’ How much less, then, can
ordinary religion be expected to help? In the
‘‘huge war’’ with ‘‘the Great Spirit of Nonbeing,
the Prince of the World,’’ God, ‘‘is defeated every
day / And does not give signs through his
churches.’’ Does this imply God will win the
war, if not the battle? We cannot speculate,
because the party in question is missing in
action: God ‘‘has been hiding so long it has
been forgotten / how he revealed himself...in
the breast of a young Jew.’’
The divine attributes of justice and mercy
are similarly veiled: ‘‘God does not multiply
sheep and camels for the virtuous / and takes
nothing away for murder and perjury.’’ Milosz
once called Job the most poetic book of the
Bible, and Job’s cry resounds through his
poems, with the same inscrutable results.
In his 1980 Nobel lecture, Milosz said that
‘‘the demoniac doings of History’’ acquire ‘‘the
traits of bloodthirsty Deity.’’ Even if these traits
are deceiving, it’s impossible to assert, based on
the evidence alone, that ‘‘history has a providen-
tial meaning.’’ In a poem that references the
gulags, Milosz says ‘‘when out of pity for others
I begged a miracle, / The sky and the earth were
silent, as always.’’
Can we understand Milosz’s beliefs? In the
poems, God seems simultaneously omnipotent
and powerless, steadfast and capricious, all-
pervading and nonexistent. Evil is winning; good
is winning. God has abandoned humanity; God
breathes through everything we do. Prayer, if not
pointless, is lacking in efficacy—‘‘you ask me how
to pray to someone who is not’’—and yet so many
of the poems are prayers. Milosz made no
apology for his inconsistencies, for they are the
stuff of real religion. He prefaced ‘‘Two Poems’’
with the statement ‘‘the poems taken together
testify to my contradictions, since the opinions
voiced in one and the other are equally mine.’’
Many contemporary thinkers have argued
that doubt is integral to belief, and Milosz is no
exception. Speaking to God, the title character of
‘‘An Alcoholic Enters the Gates of Heaven’’ says,
‘‘It seems to me that people who cannot believe in
you / deserve your praise.’’ The ode to the pope
suggests that ‘‘only the doubters remain faithful.’’
The poet’s beliefs spark and glimmer and
fall, only to rise from the ashes in the next
poem. As his work shifted in and out of ortho-
doxy, how did Milosz keep the faith? Only in the
most important sense: he kept talking to God.
Though any Pole of his age would be justified in
ending the conversation, Milosz miraculously
did not succumb to permanent bitterness. ‘‘I
have felt the pull of despair,’’ he said in the
Nobel lecture, ‘‘yet on a deeper level, I believe,
my poetry remained sane and, in a dark age,
expressed a longing for the Kingdom of Peace
and Justice.’’
Worshipping the God who nourished him
‘‘with honey and wormwood,’’ reciting prayers
‘‘against my abominable unbelief,’’ and perhaps
‘‘made wise by mere searching,’’ Milosz stood
with those who ‘‘prais[ed] your name’’ even as
they continued to suffer. Writing into his 90s, he
identified himself as a ‘‘worker in the vineyard’’
and hoped he would ‘‘prove to be deserving.’’
Embracing the most painful contradictions,
Milosz’s great poetic and spiritual achievement
is that he refused, finally, to give God the silent
treatment. Perhaps now his uncertain prayers
are fulfilled, and he walks, as he hoped, ‘‘holding
the hem of the king’s garment.’’
Source:Laura Sheahen, ‘‘A Different Kind of Faithful-
ness,’’ inAmerica, Vol. 191, No. 14, November 8, 2004,
pp. 8–11.Jeremy Driscoll
In the following essay, Driscoll, a Benedictine
monk, gives a Catholic reading of Czeslaw
Milosz’s poetry, particularly those poems which
explore a Christian or Catholic theme.
Joseph Brodsky once declared that ‘‘Czes-
law Milosz is one of the greatest poets of our
time, perhaps the greatest.’’ After his death on
August 14 [2004], many of the obituaries and
published tributes said the same thing. Milosz’s
greatness was displayed not only in his poetry
but also in his prose. In both he showed himself
to be one of the bravest and sharpest thinkers of
his time, as most critics have agreed. Yet there is
an element of his greatness that has been gener-
ally avoided or underestimated even by his
admirers. One rarely sees Milosz discussed as a
Christian writer or his work as an expression of a
profoundly religious imagination. How is it pos-
sible to praise Milosz as poet and thinker with-
out coming to grips with his Christian vision? To
do so is not just to ignore an essential dimension
of his work; it is to miss the heart of his message.In Music