writing. Second, the depth of his humility and
poverty before faith.
In one poem, he addresses God wryly, say-
ing, ‘‘It seems to me that people who cannot
believe in you / deserve your praise,’’ and he con-
fesses later in the same poem, ‘‘I pray to you, for I
do not know how not to pray.’’ This struggle
spanned his entire life. Only a few years ago,
feeling his age, he wrote, ‘‘Now You are closing
down my five senses, slowly, / And I am an old
manlyingindarkness.../Liberatemefromguilt,
real and imagined. / Give me certainty that I
toiled for Your glory. / In the hour of the agony
of death, help me with Your suffering / Which
cannot save the world from pain.’’
In a piece written in 1991 he mused at length
about the difficulty of sharing thoughts like
these. ‘‘I feel obliged to speak the truth to my
contemporaries and I feel ashamed if they take
me to be someone who I am not. In their opin-
ion, a person who ‘had faith’ is fortunate. They
assume that as a result of certain inner experi-
ences he was able to find an answer, while they
know only questions. So how can I make a pro-
fession of faith in the presence of my fellow
human beings? After all, I am one of them, seek-
ing, as they do, the laws of inheritance, and I am
just as confused....’’
But let us come to the content of what he
believed: ‘‘To put it very simply and bluntly, I
must ask if I believe that the four Gospels tell
the truth. My answer to this is: Yes. So I believe
in an absurdity, that Jesus rose from the dead?
Just answer without any of those evasions and
artful tricks employed by theologians: Yes or No?
I answer: Yes, and by that response I nullify
death’s omnipotence. If I am mistaken in my
faith, I offer it as a challenge to the Spirit of the
Earth.... ’’ Later in the same piece he asked,
‘‘Ought I to try to explain ‘why I believe’? I
don’t think so. It should suffice if I attempt to
convey the coloring or tone. If I believed that man
can do good with his own powers, I would have
no interest in Christianity. But he cannot, because
he is enslaved to his own predatory, domineering
instincts... Evil grows and bears fruit, which is
understandable, because it has logic and proba-
bility on its side and also, of course, strength. The
resistance of tiny kernels of good, to which no one
grants the power of causing far-reaching conse-
quences, is entirely mysterious, however. Such
seeming nothingness not only lasts but contains
within itself enormous energy which is revealed
gradually. One can draw momentous conclusions
from this.’’
Milosz believed that the religious question
ought to be explored in the mainstream of liter-
ature and culture. As he grew older, he used the
authority he had acquired to challenge those of
his colleagues who believed that discussions of
religion were beneath their dignity. ‘‘To write on
literature or art was considered an honorable
occupation,’’ he wrote in 1997, ‘‘whereas any
time notions taken from the language of religion
appeared, the one who brought them up was
immediately treated as lacking in tact, as if a
silent pact had been broken. Yet I lived at a
time when a huge change in the contents of the
human imagination was occurring. In my life-
time Heaven and Hell disappeared, the belief in
life after death was considerably weakened. How
could I not think of this? And is it not surprising
that my preoccupation was a rare case?’’
Czeslaw Milosz stood apart as a poet who
dared to be preoccupied with such things. He
believed that many of the horrors of the twenti-
eth century had their roots in the effort to liber-
ate people from religion. Milosz witnessed these
efforts first-hand and reflected on their results:
‘‘Religion, opium for the people. To those suffer-
ing pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it
promised a reward in an afterlife. And now we
are witnessing a transformation. A true opium
for the people is a belief in nothingness after
death—the huge solace of thinking that for our
betrayals, greed, cowardice, murder we are not
going to be judged.’’
The evidence of Milosz’s Christianity is
spread throughout his poems and essays in frag-
mentary clues. Rarely did he discuss the topic
systematically. His faith was often a kind of
secret which, once noticed, could explain at
least in part his choice of themes and subjects.
But sometimes it would come to the surface of
his work. In 2002, Milosz published a long poem
that was meant to function as a testimonial,A
Theological Treatise. Milosz was aware that he
was risking his reputation by venturing to write
about theology, but he chose to use his credibil-
ity and clout to address a theme that literary
fashion silently prohibited. ‘‘Why theology?’’ he
asks in the first paragraph of this poem. (There
are twenty-three paragraphs in the whole treatise,
each containing varying numbers of stanzas.)
He answers, ‘‘Because the first must be first. /
And first is a notion of truth.’’ The paragraphIn Music