Does God Exist?

Czeslaw Milosz’s poetic journey

The binding of my 1988 paperback edition of Czeslaw Milosz’s The Collected Poems is drying out, so that some sections of pages are coming apart. But what haven’t dried out are my many yellow post-its throughout the book—notes on various poems that especially spoke to me two or three decades ago. Many of these poems address in some way Milosz’s relation to God—which is what interests me for this post.

(Just a prefatory note on the translations. Milosz wrote in his native Polish, but he himself was the translator or co-translator of nearly all the poems in this collection.)

In his first published collection, Three Winters (1936), there’s the poem “Hymn,” with its refrain “There is no one between you and me,” addressed to God. In the very helpful Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz (1987), he says of this poem: “This is the most pantheistic of all my poems. . . . the ecstasy of union with God, who is also the world.”

Ecstasy has melted away by the time of Milosz’s “How It Was,” from City Without a Name (1969). Here the world is emptied of God:

Stalking a deer I wandered deep into the mountains and from there I saw. . . .

Above the hills of blackwood and a slab of ocean and the steps of a glacier, carmine-colored in the dust.

I saw absence; the mighty power of counter-fulfillment; the penalty of a promise lost forever . . .

God the Father didn’t walk about any longer tending the new shoots of a cedar, no longer did man hear his rushing spirit.

His son did not know his sonship and turned his eyes away when passing by a neon cross flat as a movie screen showing a striptease.

This time it was really the end of the Old and the New Testament. . . .

—until the final line—

And those who longed for the Kingdom took refuge like me in the mountains to become the last heirs of a dishonored myth.

A few pages later in this volume, God’s absence is revisited in the poem “Counsels”:

[God] has been hiding so long that it has been forgotten
how he revealed himself in the burning bush
And in the breast of a young Jew
ready to suffer for all who were and will be.

In Milosz’s 1974 collection, From the Rising of the Sun, “Oeconomia Divina” offers us a God who is still silent. But there’s a comic vision of the world left on its own. For God allows people

to act whatever way they wished,
leaving to them conclusions, saying nothing. . . .
Dispossessed of its objects, space was swarming.
Everywhere was nowhere and nowhere, everywhere.
Letters in books turned silver-pale, wobbled, and faded. . . .
People, afflicted with an incomprehensible distress,
were throwing off their clothes on the piazzas so that nakedness might call for judgement. . . .

Talking about this poem in Conversations, Milosz explains that for many centuries of Christianity, “‘Oeconomia Divina’ was understood as the edification of the world by God and a form of education—the meting out of punishments and rewards, God’s involvement with the world.” But in this poem “we have God’s next educational intention. God decided to withdraw, to become Deus absconditus. God is not to be seen. . . . God has hidden Himself; no trace of His presence can be found.”

Reading this, I’m reminded of Simone Weil, who in fact—as Milosz notes in Conversations—“was a major influence on me.” For Weil, he continues, “a world bound by necessity and chains of causes has no room for God. God seems to have withdrawn. He has hidden, and that is why necessity exists.”

Milosz’s absent God reaches a sort of climax in “On Prayer”—from his 1986 collection Unattainable Earth. Here’s the whole poem:

You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word ‘is’
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore
We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.

What strikes me here is the lusciousness of images for prayer to a non-existent deity: that “velvet bridge,” the “landscapes the color ripe gold,” the “magic stopping of the sun.” And I’m struck, too—thinking of all of Milosz’s poems I’ve touched on so far—by the poetic energy he puts into envisioning a God who is absent, hidden, silent.

Curious about Milosz’s poetry after this 1988 Collected Poems (for he lived until 2004), I bought a volume that includes Last Poems, published in 2011, selected and translated by his son Anthony Milosz. And what a surprise to find as its very first poem—after the absent God of the 1988 collection—the 2002 poem “Presence,” which includes these lines:

I grew up in a Catholic family, and so my surroundings were soon teeming with devils, but also with the saints of the Lord.

Yet in truth I felt their Presence, all of them, god and demons,

As if rising within one enormous unknowable Being.

Then soon this Presence becomes God—as in this 3-line poem:

I pray to my bedside god.
Because He must have billions of ears,
And one ear He keeps always open for me.

All the poems in Last Poems were written in 2002-2003—so in Milosz’s final years. And several are rooted in Christian theology. “Heaven,” for instance, takes its epigraph from the Catholic Catechism: “Our Father who art in heaven. The expression ‘who art in heaven’ doesn’t refer to a place, but to the majesty of God and His presence in the hearts of men.” The poem then begins: “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be in heaven.”

Other poems focus on William Blake (who as he was dying “knew that he was just moving to another / realm, invisible to the eyes of mortals,” or are voiced by the high-priest’s son in Jesus’ time, or by one of many whom Jesus healed—as in this untitled poem which begins:

Turning our faces to Him,
we were granted new eyesight, able
to look into the Sun.

Then the third stanza:

Blind, lame, paralytic, twisted
we lived in the vigor of the years we recovered.

Finally, I want to note the poem “Sanctificetur,” which begins “What is a man without Your name on his lips?” and later adds:

A man who is good, hallows Your name,
whosoever desires You, hallows Your name. . . .

So Milosz has gone from the 1986 “You ask me how to pray to someone who is not” to the 2002-2003 “What is a man without Your name on his lips?” It’s quite a journey: from wistful atheism to a confident dialogue with God. Not a mere return to the religious faith of his upbringing, but a reinvigoration of it, the closer he gets to that formerly inscrutable “other shore.”

Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.

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