light of something he tells us later in the poem:
‘‘Only a dark tone, an inclination toward a pecu-
liar Manichean / strain of Christianity, could
have led one to the proper trail.’’ Here ‘‘the proper
trail’’ means the proper interpretation of his
work. All this comes in the paragraph that begins,
‘‘Topresentmyselfatlastasanheirtomystical
lodges... ’’ He is confessing much, disclosing
much, at these points in his testament. He is
providing his readers with clearer information
about his spiritual life. Hence the ‘‘at last’’ which
introduces this revealing paragraph. He is
expressing relief as he finally reveals the sources
and limits of his religious anxiety.
What is significant for Milosz’s readers in
this kind of writing is that he names in himself
what is a fundamental religious question of our
times; namely, getting past Job. Getting past
Job—or for that matter, getting past a Mani-
chean Christianity—is a serious religious chal-
lenge. The Christian tradition is in fact equipped
to take the serious searcher past Job, but it was
precisely this part of the tradition that was some-
how not delivered to Milosz and which does not
appear in the poem. I would suggest that it is only
possible to move past Job by going through Job.
There is a tradition of Christian exegesis
which reads Job as a prophecy of Christ. One
can even imagine Job’s complaint provoking the
Incarnation and the cross as the response from
God. The prefiguration becomes explicit at Job
10:4–5, where Job says to God, ‘‘Have you eyes
of flesh? Do you see as man sees? Are your days
as the days of a mortal?’’ In fact, in the Incarna-
tion and the death of Jesus, God can now answer
Yes to this question. This Yes is strongly under-
lined in the phrase from St. Paul in the Letter to
the Philippians 2:8: ‘‘obedient unto death, yes,
death on a cross.’’ In the same part of the poem
where Milosz quipped about the little girls
dressed in white for First Communion, he also
warns, ‘‘And it will not do to prattle on about
sweet little Jesus / in the hay of his cradle.’’ But,
of course, sweet little Jesus in the hay is not the
central announcement of Christian faith. The
central announcement is Jesus Christ, ‘‘and him
crucified’’ (1 Corinthians 2:2). Milosz’s warning
against a sweet little Jesus is equivalent to Job’s
demand for a serious answer to his serious ques-
tion. But the death of Jesus on the cross is God’s
serious answer. In the end, Milosz’sTreatise
does not grapple deeply enough with this divine
answer.
To come back to Milosz’s words at this
point in the poem, he notes a difference between
himself and Job—namely, that Job thought of
himself as innocent while the poet is not. ‘‘I was
not innocent, I wanted to be innocent, but I
couldn’t be.’’ But in the end it was not Job’s
innocence that was important but rather the
majesty and mystery of God, before which Job
bowed down and became silent. In an earlier
writing Milosz had shown himself to be aware
that this was the key insight of Job, even if, in the
poet’s version of the story, God says things that
are rather more severe than anything to be found
in the book of Job. In a little essay titled ‘‘Mis-
fortune’’ in Milosz’sABCs, Milosz writes, ‘‘To
create a universe like the one we have is not nice.
‘And why should I have to be nice?’ asks God.
‘Where did you get such ideas?’’’ This is strong
thinking. It is acquiescence to the impenetrable
mystery of God, an acquiescence to whatever of
God the death of Jesus on the cross is meant to
reveal.
When in theTreatiseMilosz refers to his
own practices as a Catholic, he speaks with a
remarkable humility, contrasting his own weak-
ness with the strength of the communion to
which he belongs. This humility is especially
striking since Milosz was, by temperament, a
proud man, as he himself often acknowledged.
His fine mind and his natural sophistication
caused him to hesitate before the requirements
of faith. But in the end he rejected the option of
turning his sophistication against more simple
believers. Near the very beginning of theTreatise
he states, ‘‘The opposition, I versus they, seemed
immoral. / It meant he [Milosz] considered him-
self better than they were.’’ At the end, having
agonized through much of the poem over the
questions posed by his Gnostic favorites, he
comes back much more strongly to a defense of
the categories of Christian worship. ‘‘Treat with
understanding persons of weak faith. // Myself
included,’’ he writes. ‘‘One day I believe, another
I disbelieve. // Yet I feel warmth among people at
prayer. / Since they believe, they help me to
believe / in their existence, these incomprehensi-
ble beings...//Naturally, I am a skeptic. Yet I
sing with them, / thus overcoming the contra-
diction / between my private religion and the
religion of the rite.’’
This confession repeats a theme that Milosz
has accented frequently in his poetry. Let three
poems suffice as examples. In one he speaksIn Music