If Only This Could Be Said

How Yes And No, Good And Evil Came To Be -Milosz

 

 

9. Not Out of Frivolity

             -From A Theological Treatise byCzeslaw Milosz

 

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.

If God is all-powerful, he can allow all this only if he is not good.

Wherefrom 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.

It’s only today that they would find their intuitions confirmed in the assertions of astrophysicists that space and time are not at all eternal, that they had once their beginning.

In one unimaginable flash, which set ticking the clock of minutes, hours, centuries.

For that was what interested them precisely, what had happened in the bosom of the Deity before the flash, how Yes and No, good and evil came to be.

Jakob Boehme believed that the visible world arose as the effect of a catastrophe, as an act of God’s mercy to prevent the further spread of pure evil.

We complain that the earth is hell’s antechamber: it might have been hell complete, without beauty, without goodness, not a ray.

The Distance Between What We Know And What We Reveal -Milosz

7. I Always Liked

                 -From A Theological Treatise byCzeslaw Milosz

 

 

I always liked Mickiewicz, though I didn’t know why.

 

Then I realized that he was writing in cipher.

And that this was a rule of poetry,

The distance between what we know and what we reveal.

 

It’s what’s inside the shell that matters. And it’s all right if readers play with shells.

 

The errors and childish imaginings of the explorers Of mysteries should be forgiven.

 

I have been mocked because of Swedenborg and like nonsense,

For I transgressed the rules of literary fashion.

 

The louts grimaced

As they discussed my pious, childish superstitions.

 

Which did not want to accept the only knowledge

Accessible to us, that people are formed by people,

And that they, together, create something that they call truth.

 

While I had to believe in Adam and Eve, and in the Fall,

And in the hope of Restoration.

Yet we believed that some of us had received a gift, a grace, to spite the force of gravity... -Milosz

 

6. In Vain

             -From A Theological Treatise byCzeslaw Milosz

 

Either gods are omnipotent and, judging by the world they created, not good; or they are good, and the world slipped from their hands, and so they are not omnipotent.

— The School of Epicurus

 

Six years old. I felt horror at the stony order of the world.

Later on, in vain, I sought shelter in colorful pictures of birds when I was the round-faced secretary of the Circle of Nature Lovers.

Charles Darwin, a clergyman-to-be, announced with regret his theory of natural selection, for he saw that it would serve the devil’ s theology.

By proclaiming the triumph of the strong and the defeat of the weak which is and has always been the devil’s program which is why he is called the Prince of This World.

Everything that creeps, runs, flies, and dies is an argument against the divinity of man.

 I turned to anti-nature, i.e., to art, in order to build our home, along with others, out of the sounds of music and paint on canvas and the rhythms of speech.

 Threatened at every moment, we marked our days on a calendar of stone or of paper.

 Ready to be caught by a cold hand reaching out of the abyss to pull us down together with our unfinished task.

Yet we believed that some of us had received a gift, a grace, to spite the force of gravity.

Changed Into A Can Of Preserves... -Milosz

 

5. A Burden

  -From A Theological Treatise byCzeslaw Milosz

 

Mickiewicz - why dabble with him if he has been sufficiently accommodated to every day use.

Changed into a can of preserves which shows, when opened, a flickering film about old Poland.

 

And Roman Catholicism, is it not better to leave it alone?

 

So that the custom of sprinkling Holy Water is preserved, and the observation of holidays, and carrying the dead to venerable cemeteries.

 

Of course, there are people who would treat it seriously, i.e, politically.

 

I have never associated myself with those enemies of the Enlightenment who hear the devil speaking in the language of liberalism and tolerance for all dissenters.

...dogmas are few inches too high; we stand on our toes and for a moment it seems to us that we see -Milosz

 

4. I Apologize

 

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.

 

Catholic dogmas are few inches too high; we stand on our toes 

and for a moment it seems to us that we see.

 

Yet the mystery of the Holy Trinity, the mystery of Original Sin, 

the mystery of the Redemption are well armored against reason.

 

Which tries in vain to get straight the story of God 

before his creation of the world, when

the separation of good from evil occurred.

 

Wandering on the outskirts of heresy is about right for me -Milosz

 

3. I Am Not

            -From: A Theological Treatise byCzeslaw Milosz 

 

 

I am not, and I do not want to be, a possessor of the truth.

Wandering on the outskirts of heresy is about right for me.

 

In order to avoid what people call ‘the serenity of faith,’ 

Which is, after all, merely self-satisfaction.

 

My Polish compatriots have always liked the language of ritual 

And disliked theology.

 

Perhaps I was like a monk in a mid-forest monastery

Who, seeing from his window a river in flood,

Wrote a treatise in Latin, a language entirely incomprehensible 

To peasants in their sheepskin coats.

 

How ridiculous to deliberate on the aesthetics of Baudelaire 

Amidst the crooked fences of a little town

Where hens rummage in the middle of a dusty street.

 

I used to turn for help to the Holy Mary,

But I had difficulty recognizing her

In the deity elevated into the gilding of altars.

More Milosz...One Day We Will All Have To Confront Our Pride.

 

2. A Poet Who Was Baptized

 -From A Theological Treatise byCzeslaw Milosz

 

A poet who was baptized

in the country church of a Catholic parish. 

And encountered

difficulties with his fellow believers.

 

He tried to guess what was going on in their heads. 

He suspected an inveterate lesion of humiliation 

Which had issued in this compensatory tribal rite. 

And yet each one of them carried his or her own fate.

 

The opposition, I versus they, seemed immoral.

 

It meant he considered himself better than they were.

 

It was easier to repeat the prayers in English

At the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Berkeley.

 

Once, driving on the freeway and coming to a fork

Where one lane leads to San Francisco, one to Sacramento,

He thought that one day he would need to write 

a theological treatise to redeem himself from the sin of pride.

LET REALITY RETURN TO OUR SPEECH -Czeslaw Milosz

Tonight while watching the 'Live Nativity' at our church I was struck by the utter simplicity of it all; how concrete and REAL it all was.  And I recalled reading (many times) Czeslaw's poem, A Theological Treatise.

In particular, these lines

"Let reality return to our speech.
That is, meaning. Impossible without an absolute point of reference."

This is our point of reference; this moment eternity when God decided that what humanity needed most was...Humanity.

How did we get HERE from there, that moment when God became man; not to exalt himself among us, but to exalt humanity.

Will we ever figure out "how to live in a phantasmagoria"

 

A Young Man

 

 

From: A Theological Treatise by Czeslaw Milosz

 

A young man couldn’t write a treatise like this,

Though I don’t think it is dictated by fear of death.

It is, simply, after many attempts, a thanksgiving.

Also, perhaps, a farewell to the decadence

Into which the language of poetry in my age has fallen.

 

Why theology? Because the first must be first.

 

And first is a notion of truth.  It is poetry precisely,

With its behavior of a bird thrashing against the transparency

Of a window-pane, that tells us

That we don’t know how to live in a phantasmagoria.

 

Let reality return to our speech.

That is, meaning. Impossible without an absolute point of reference.

 

 

 

Always Our Brother's Keeper

If there is no God,
Not everything is permitted to man.
He is still his brother’s keeper
And he is not permitted to sadden his brother,
By saying that there is no God.

Czeslaw Milosz

Photo:Thematic And Dramatic Self-Portraiture By Noell S. Oszvald