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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
August 22, 2004
Czeslaw Milosz
Poland passed through the middle of the 20th century as few other nations (and most of those its immediate neighbours) experiencing the full onslaught of Nazism from one side then Communism from the other. Old gallant Catholic Poland whose officers met the Wehrmacht on horseback and who were buried in mass graves at Katyn remains an anomaly to this day: the last national bastion of public Catholicism in Europe. The presence of Polish troops in Iraq commanding the multinational contingent reminds us that there is one country that remains unabashed in support of America and the West. Within the European Union the Poles have become leaders of the "New Europe" whose desire is for a genuinely free community of nations rather than to be ruled by an axis of France and Germany. It is perhaps a holding action and Poland too will crumble; or perhaps Poland offers a bulwark for the recovery of Christendom and the West. There is a deeper history in this than is first apparent and through four divisions of its territories over centuries Poland has survived as itself. To my ears the voice of this very Polish nobility of spirit has been alongside the Pope's that of Czeslaw Milosz -- the poet and thinker who died last weekend in Krakow at the age of 93. He is known casually as the holder of a Nobel Prize from 1980 -- awarded then as a fashionable acknowledgement of the Solidarity movement in Gdansk -- but it should be said that Milosz is among the few Nobel laureates for literature who is also a great and lasting writer. The Captive Mind published in English in 1953 after his defection from Communist-ruled Poland is among the few 20th-century books with the power to change a person's political outlook to accommodate truth instead of lies. I know two impressive Canadians who were cured of their puerile leftism by their encounter with that book. For the essays in it go beyond condemning totalitarianism to exposing the way intellectuals in Poland and in general accommodate themselves to it; and how the lie working within them hollows them out. A quarter-century later The Land of Ulro was offered as an attempt to delve further into questions superficially political but finally spiritual and thus touching every side of the business of writing poetry. Milosz wrestles with the Enlightenment tradition of the West -- and its project to reduce irreducible verities to the void of pure rationalism. To this revolt against God he opposes the individualist visions of poets and theologians from Swedenborg and Blake to his own remarkable uncle the symbolist Oscar Lubicz-Milosz. Replying to Karl Marx's old saw that religion is the "opium of the people" Milosz once said: "A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death -- the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals greed cowardice murders we are not going to be judged." Milosz was in a living dialectic with the Church and Catholic orthodoxy throughout his life sacramental by disposition and constantly returning to the faith with some poetical insight casting light upon it. His best thinking was resolved in a series of long poems published over the decades which he called "traktats" or treatises -- part narrative part lyrical part philosophical. To his earlier "Moral Treatise" and "Treatise on Poetry" he added a "Theological Treatise" completed in his nineties. I know of it only in Polish but have been told that it crowns his legacy. His death comes as a shock despite his advanced age for there are characters of such energy that it is impossible to imagine them dead and Milosz is among the remarkable souls who continued growing to the end. By his death I find my thoughts turned to him in a new way. ("This day you will be with me in paradise.") Death lifts a worthy writer up we see him differently. He begins to speak as it were from the grave. There is fake solitude for the fake poet true solitude for the true. Though a voice of Poland Milosz is saying things that can only be said by one man: especially when he expresses Catholic truth. His voice is a man's voice quite specific and decisive. While preparing to write this I looked off my balcony along the roof-edge of an apartment across the road: a long row of pigeons. And unaccountably part way along the row there was one robin. That I thought is Czeslaw Milosz. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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