The noble traveller Book

I confess I often struggle to justify to myself any interest I take in properly hermetic authors. After all, have their best insights not already been expressed by various philosophers, scientists, poets, and theologians, and with less recourse to nearly impenetrable imaginal systems and obscure dicta? Alchemy, Kabbalah, and the like are intriguing traditions, but where does one place eccentrics like O. V. de L. Milosz?

Oskar Wladyslaw Milosz (1877-1939) was an only child. His father was an atheistic Lithuanian aristocrat and his mother was Jewish, the daughter of a Hebrew teacher of Warsaw. He had a lonely upbringing on the family estate in Belarus. At twelve, his parents sent him to school in Paris. But he rebelled against the rationalism of his time and embraced the study of antiquities rather than the more prestigious sciences. He ended up a fin-de-siècle Symbolist poet and playwright, participating in the vibrant artistic scenes of prewar Paris. But he was subject to deep depression and inner turmoil, culminating in a mystical experience in 1914 that pivoted him toward hermeticism and Christianity. The Russian Revolution destroyed his family wealth, and postwar nationalism forced him to choose a citizenship. He chose his ancestral Lithuania, even though he did not speak Lithuanian, and became a decorated diplomat. In 1927, while still deep in metaphysical speculation, he started to practice Catholicism. He died shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, in retirement in Fontainebleau.

Milosz's anti-Newtonian esotericism was an attempt to recast the world as a spiritual unity. The paradigm is put forward most clearly in his 1927 Arcana. Milosz believed (even prior to his encounter with Einstein) that time and space are relative, products of universal movement, the blood and rhythm of the cosmos. Thought is the sensation of this movement. Space-time-matter was created by an unspeakable act of divine sacrifice, by which God, the Interior, in love produced the exterior or nothing. Man's primitive awareness spanned this nothing and totally identified the microcosm with the macrocosm; so the whole universe was his body. The Fall, if I understand Milosz correctly, hinged on a shift in man's understanding of the nothing. This nothing was a means of union between creature and Creator. Man fell when, under the influence of sensuous perception, he invoked the Nothing directly. Space became an infinite container of matter over which man could assert his will. Time became pointless infinite duration. Man no longer lives in the instantaneity of divine life. Yet Milosz believed that the world would one day reunite under the Catholic Church, perhaps under the influence of a great poet to come.

Oskar Milosz invaded my imagination through the poetry and prose of his relative, Czesław Miłosz. In Czesław's telling, not only was Oskar a visionary, but a gentle saint, of whom even animals were entirely unafraid. As he witnessed the turbulent unfolding of the twentieth century, Czesław came to regard his eccentric uncle as a kind of new William Blake, a prophet and rebel against the captivity of the world to ugly mechanical imagination. Oskar Milosz implanted in him a profound belief in the ideal, and hence that dissatisfaction in worldly imperfection which accompanied the younger Miłosz for the rest of his life. Czesław, who directly witnessed many of the worst atrocities of his century, was deeply conscious of this. And it is here that I find common feeling. Thinking like an idealist while being forced to live as a pragmatist wounds the soul. Yet as Czesław recognized, we need dreams of apocatastasis in a heavy age. We need our Blakes and Miloszes who can see rebirth and utopia even through the apparent downward spiritual spiral of modernity.