‘A Passionate Pursuit of the Real’: Theology and Poetics in Czesław Miłosz’s Writings

Abstract

This chapter examines Czesław Miłosz’s engagement with the debates between modernist and neo-scholastic theologians. As Miłosz’s essays and reviews from the 1930s-1950s demonstrate, he considered the philosophical and intellectual tendencies that led to the modernist crisis to have shaped the political milieu of interwar Europe. His engagement with modernist theology was mediated by two Polish philosophers and critics, Marian Zdziechowski and Stanisław Brzozowski, whose works provided Miłosz with a springboard for his reflections on the role of religion in the modern world. The chapter demonstrates that the politics of the interwar period, in particular the rise of fascism, nationalism, and antisemitism, served Miłosz as a foil that revealed the shortcomings of both theological modernism and neo-Thomism. While critical of both theological movements, Miłosz drew on them extensively in the domain of aesthetics, as his reflections on the status and role of poetry in the modern world were informed by the concepts of ‘pure poetry’ put forward by Henri Bremond and the neo-Thomist understanding of art advocated by Jacques Maritain.