concludes with a plea and a stipulation: ‘‘Let
reality return to our speech. / That is, meaning.
Impossible without an absolute point of refer-
ence.’’ In this testimonial poem, Milosz directly
acknowledges God as the absolute point of refer-
ence. Many of the Christian themes scattered
throughout his writings are here gathered
together. One such theme is the frank expression
of his own struggle with various elements of Cath-
olic life. He always took theology seriously, but
he sometimes wrote about theologians with bitter
irony. He found the clericalism in some sectors of
the Polish Church to be exaggerated and distaste-
ful. ‘‘I apologize, most reverend theologians, for a
tone not befitting / the purple of your robes. // I
thrash in the bed of my style, searching for a
comfortable position, / not too sanctimonious,
not too mundane. // There must be a middle
place between abstraction and childishness /
where one can talk seriously about serious
things.’’
Milosz was wary of the comfortable abstract
formulas offered by the academic theologian;
they seemed to have little to do with the horrible
questions his life story had forced him to con-
front. He recoiled from mechanical presenta-
tions of doctrine and easy explanations of
suffering. When a clerical and theological style
becomes stiff or sanctimonious, it cannot be
taken seriously by people engaged in life-and-
death struggles. But a poetry that spoke only of
this-worldly things—a poetry that was ‘‘too
mundane’’—would fail to satisfy the deepest
longings of the heart. Milosz rightly aims for a
‘‘middle place’’ where it is possible to ‘‘talk seri-
ously about serious things.’’
Yet Milosz believed, somewhat problemati-
cally, that the most serious things resisted any
kind of definition. The mysteries of the faith
were to be praised, described, but not explained.
‘‘Catholic dogmas are a few inches too high; we
stand on our toes / and for a moment it seems to
us that we see,’’ he writes in the Treatise. ‘‘Yet the
mystery of the Holy Trinity, the mystery of Orig-
inal Sin, / the mystery of the Redemption are all
well armored against reason...//What in all
that can be grasped by little girls / dressed in
white for First Communion?’’
Milosz’s long testimonial poem also reveals
his Gnostic leanings. The tendency makes for
interesting poems, but it adds to his difficulties
with Catholic theology. ‘‘Not out of frivolity,
most reverend theologians, I busied myself with
the secret / knowledge of many centuries, but out
of the pain in my heart when I looked out / at the
atrocity of the world.’’ Here Milosz is explaining
and justifying his turn to Gnostic texts for help.
He addresses himself to the ‘‘most reverend the-
ologians’’ to complain that his need was not
being met by their pat assurances. The pain
Milosz refers to in this poem is not merely an
intellectual sorrow: he is writing not just about
the universal tragedy; he is writing about the
tragedies of his own life. Wounded by the
betrayals and injustices he has witnessed, he
longs to understand the mysteries of evil and
innocent suffering: ‘‘If God is all-powerful, he
can allow all this only if he is not good. // Where-
from then the limits of his power? Why such an
order of creation? They all / tried to find an
answer, heretics, kabbalists, alchemists, the
Knights of the Rose Cross.’’ Here he cites the
Gnostic sources to which he turned. Surely he
was led in this direction by reading Jacob
Boehme, who had so strongly influenced Adam
Mickiewicz, the critical point of reference for all
modern Polish poetry.
It would have been impossible for Milosz
not to have gone this Gnostic way, at least to
some extent. In addition to the Mickiewicz influ-
ence, his own temperament inclined him toward
it. The horrors he lived through caused him to
pose the same questions as these Gnostic texts,
and orthodox Christianity was not giving him
the spiritual answers he needed. But if the Chris-
tianity of his time and place was not delivering
those answers, this does not mean that the
answers were not there. And in Milosz’s struggle
we see him betray an instinctive understanding
that this may be the case. This explains why, in
the midst of the Treatise’s lengthy discussion of
Gnostic questions, he also narrates his own prac-
tice of Catholic life. He is being driven by some-
thing larger than himself, and it is nothing less
than his whole Catholic faith, whether he always
chooses it or not. He admits, ‘‘Alas, an American
saying has applied to me, though it was not
coined with kindly intent: / ‘Once a Catholic,
always a Catholic.’’’ He is not always comfort-
able with his religious inheritance, and yet some-
thing compels him never to abandon it.
Milosz often sensed a lack in his own faith, and
he confesses this in theTreatise, as elsewhere (see
‘‘Distance,’’ above): ‘‘Why not concede,’’ he asks,
‘‘that I have not progressed, in my religion, / past
the Book of Job?’’ This can best be understood inIn Music