Hope, from The World (A Naïve Poem)
Hope means that someone believes the earth
Is not a dream, that it is living flesh;
That sight, touch, hearing tell the truth;
And that all the things we have known here
Are like a garden, looked at from the gate.
You can't go in, but you can see it's there.
And if we could see clearly and more wisely
We know we'd find in the world's garden
Some new flower or undiscovered star.
Some people think our eyes deceive us; they say
That there is nothing but a pretty seeming:
And just these are the ones who don't have hope.
They think that when a person turns away
The whole world vanishes behind his back
As if a clever thief had snatched it up.
I posted about the death of Czeslaw Milosz two days ago, here. Also two days ago, The New Republic online republished Leon Wieseltier's August 1, 1983 review of Milosz's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (Harvard University), The Witness of Poetry:
The Witness of Poetry ... is the credo of a great poet. It reveals that Milosz is really a religious thinker. His religiousness is not "tacit", as a critic recently claimed; it is explicit, as it has been in his poems for many years. What is tacit, in this book, is his politics. The politics, to be sure, are anti-Communist; and the authority of Milosz's anticommunism is pretty much absolute. He is angry at universalism and utopianism. 'The young cannibals who, in the name of inflexible principles, butchered the population of Cambodia, had graduated from the Sorbonne,' he observes, 'and were simply trying to implement the philosophic ideas they had learned.' ... Milosz reveres, instead, human custom. And he reveres the Roman patrimony of his country — 'Latin as the language of the church and of literature, the theological quarrels of the Middle Ages, Latin poetry as a model for Renaissance poets, white churches in the baroque style'.
All of this might make him suspect, as he puts it, 'of entering into an alliance with reactionaries, for in our century it is they who are the rear guard defending a discrimination among values'. The rhetoric may sound a little stiff, so let us agree at once that there are allies of reactionaries and there are allies of reactionaries. Milosz is not the kind who praises Edmund Burke from the Waldorf Towers. His reverence for human custom is based upon the personal participation in it. The same is true of his religiousness. He does not shill for the spiritual life, or for its civil utility; he lives spiritually. For this reason his credo is not precisely criticism, but something more primary. For this reason, too, Milosz does not carry his faith like a flag. His quarrels with Western literature and Western politics are many, but he is nobody's scourge. He seeks to illuminate, but not quite to influence. This is the humility of the genuinely conservative, and the privacy of the genuinely religious. It is also the restraint of a man who bears many of ideology's scars, who is familiar with the consequences of forcing the soul's certainties upon society.
Perhaps the most paradoxical feature of this century is that it is the century for which the spiritual should be most obvious. How could the slaughters of Hitler and Stalin, and the Communist captivity of half of Europe and most of Asia, not shake the soul? The striking thing about Milosz's insistence upon a dimension of the holy is its appositeness to the age. Milosz's raised point of regard, his feud with the aesthetic and scientific circumscriptions of reality, is a perfectly plausible response to the events he has experienced. It is not a leap of faith. History leapt; he did not. Like the Siennese and Florentine painters of the late fourteenth century, who responded to the mortalitá of the Black Death with a rudely transcendental art — nothing so fearfully foreshadows the corpse-consciousness of the mid-twentieth century as Boccaccio's opening pages — Milosz demands a more decisive knowledge. 'Veni Creator', he called a poem written in 1961.
Come, Holy Spirit
bending or not bending the grasses,
appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame,
at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow
covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada.
I am only a man: I need visible signs.
I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.
Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church
lift its hand, only once, just once, for me.Nor is he the only one whose power of religious perception has been quickened by the horrors of his history. Leszek Kolakowski, the other intellectual who was Poland's loss and our gain, long ago exchanged the scholastics of the Party for the scholastics of the Church. (In 1976 I sat in Kolakowski's seminar at All Souls and heard him explain all that Lucien Goldmann did not understand about Pascal; it remains in my memory as an exemplary exercise of the uncaptive mind.) There are sufferings that put the purely secular to shame, that create a need for meanings that neither reason nor society can satisfy. The secularization of modern life was anyway an exaggeration; a lot of religion remained. But there is no way that some of the traditional themes of religion can be dodged after the scale and the style of contemporary carnage.
Much has been written about the collapse of the eighteenth century in the calamities of the twentieth century — too much, because the rejection of the Enlightenment was as much responsible for what occurred as the acceptance of the Enlightenment. Still, for the walking wounded, the untragic point of view is insufficient. It cannot have answers to questions it cannot ask. And there is no point of view that is less tragic than Marxism. It continues to reproduce the instrumental illusion of the last centuries, the confidence in man's demiurgic power over society, as if nothing ever happened. This has the consequence of cynicism, which seems to be the most popular feeling east of the Elbe. It also has the consequence of an intellectual crackup, of a necessary exchange of new lies for old truths. Milosz has exchanged the lethal shallowness of this tradition for its ancient antithesis. His solution is the resacralization of the world.
This is a notable, important review and needs to be read in full. (Link via 3quarksdaily.)
