Miłosz and a secular age

Miłosz and a secular age Łukasz Tischner The subject of my presentation would seem quite exhaustively covered—and moreover, it was repeatedly addressed by Czesław Miłosz himself in his poetry and essays. It suffices to recall The Land of Ulro, in which he examined the causes for the erosion of the religious imagination, or the last volume of poetry he published in his lifetime—The Second Space, with its opening A Treatise on Theology. But I have been persuaded to approach the topic once more upon reading Charles Taylor’s fundamental work, A Secular Age,1 which was declared a classic only a year after its publication. We might state in passing that the outstanding Canadian philosopher makes mention of The Land of Ulro in this book, though Miłosz seldom appears in its pages. Taylor’s book is an invaluable guide through the labyrinth of ideas that mark out the horizon of twentieth‐century man’s religious and secular intuitions. With incomparable clarity, Taylor demonstrates their genealogy, while simultaneously demythologizing our knowledge of the “secular age.” Taylor’s basic distinctions will permit me to organize disparate fields of research and investigate why Miłosz appears to write against the spirit of his secular times. The reasons for this seem, in my opinion, to go beyond the confessional. In my necessarily concise observations, I shall recall a few pieces of poetry that help us to understand the cause of his revolt. The porous self and the buffered self Let’s begin with a few general premises. I will adopt Taylor’s notion of the secular age (i.e.—in approximate terms—the period from the end of World War I to the present day) as an epoch in which the conditions of faith were radically altered. Religion is no longer an axiom inscribed in the legal/political order, but has become one of many possible alternatives. It is characteristic of the secular age to make the invalidation of all goals apart from human flourishing a thinkable reality. The difference between bygone eras and the present times is marked by transformations in three realms: firstly, natural phenomena have ceased to be apprehended as signs of God’s activity. Second, God no longer guarantees the socio‐political order. Third, the process which Max Weber called “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) has taken place. Taylor focuses our attention on the characteristic shape of this “disenchantment.” In the “enchanted” world there was no clear line dividing human and non‐human forces. Holy relics could bring the ailing back to health, or lay a curse upon thieves who dared to try and plunder them. The world was full of all kinds of powers and forces that could make their way inside a human being. Taylor concludes with the statement that in the “enchanted” world we were dealing with a “porous self,” while in the secular age the “self” is buffered, surrounded by armor. The “porous self” was vulnerable, at the mercy of external forces—mysterious entities, or even spirits, penetrated inside it, as into a sieve. The “buffered self,” on the other hand, depends entirely on the power of its own mind, and establishes the significance of the things it encounters. The “buffered self” has the tendency to distance itself from what lies beyond the limits of its mind—from the world of nature and other people. It is invulnerable to and fearless toward the outside world. And yet, Taylor holds, the “porous self”—for all its superstitions and “immaturity”—was in many respects better equipped than its contemporary equivalent. It would appear that Miłosz, too, is sympathetic toward this archaic self, paradoxically seeing it as a more trustworthy medium of truth about the world, an issue to which we will return in a moment. Meanwhile, we ought to recall what, in Taylor’s opinion, determined the power of superstition in times past. The Canadian philosopher writes of the carnival and its significance in the stabilized socio‐religious order. He echoes Victor Turner2 in speaking of the tension between “structure,” or the code of behavior accepted in a given community that defines roles in a society and the status of its various members...

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