Czesław Miłosz’s Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity by Stanley Bill

Abstract

Reviewed by: Czesław Miłosz’s Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity by Stanley Bill Magdalena Kay Bill, Stanley. Czesław Miłosz’s Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2021. ix + 204 pp. Notes. Works cited. Index. $80.00: £60.00. The first chapter of Stanley Bill’s book makes the brilliant choice to begin not with the body but with the longing to reach beyond it: namely, Czesław Miłosz’s concern with transcendence. Belief in transcendence is rooted in the belief that separation from the body is possible, yet in the twentieth century, this belief is put in crisis. This crisis is, to Miłosz, at the heart of European intellectual modernity (p. 8). Readers of Charles Taylor may quarrel with the equation of this crisis with secularization but to Miłosz, secularization is very much real and compels response. Stanley Bill is absolutely right to begin his book with this urgency, as Miłosz is an agonistic thinker. He does not shy away from Miłosz’s (seeming) contradictions: well aware of the ‘polyphonic’ nature of Miłosz’s poems and dialectical thought process, Bill does not seek to unify its disparate strands into handy synthesis. Indeed, it is an achievement to explicate the ideas of a complex thinker without simplifying them. Throughout this study, Bill writes with an eye to big ideas that will interest general audiences beyond Slavic Studies (and perhaps the title of the book could have signaled this orientation). Miłosz held many controversial opinions, and Bill does an excellent job of clearly summarizing them while avoiding the drama attendant upon purposely stoking controversy. The book elucidates how both Miłosz’s thought and poetic practice frequently reflect ‘a mixed or “transcendent” materialism’ in which ‘his writings [End Page 547] affirm the embodied nature of human experience, while still insisting that matter is capable of generating properties that partially transcend it: poetry, consciousness, and even a version of the “soul”’ (p. 4). This is well put. Here Bill carefully maps out a terrain of more-than-physical meaning that cannot simply be described as transcendent — the term is too simplistic to account for the many “properties” that seem to point beyond the body (for instance, through lyric poetry). The metaphor implicit in the term transcendence — a climbing up or out — is complicated in Miłosz’s work. Bill clarifies the two dimensions of Miłosz’s transcendence, the vertical (rising higher) and the horizontal (going deeper). Their crossing ‘unites’ the human self (p. 5). Bill perceptively connects these concepts to the political realm, in which ‘a disappointed desire for disembodiment’ (p. 72) underlies the attraction of totalitarianism, and to Miłosz’s writing about gender. This is tricky territory, and Bill gracefully maneuvers between clear-eyed recognition of Miłosz’s essentialized gender associations and the expressed possibility of reversing sexist hierarchies. It may be impossible to reconstruct Miłosz as a pro-feminist writer, but Bill’s discussion helpfully demonstrates Miłosz’s insistence on the metaphysical and poetic value of ‘feminine’ embodiment. As one reads, however, it also becomes obvious that some of these lines of thought do not start or end with Miłosz. Possible points of contact come to mind, and we may wonder whether Bill decided not to elaborate them in order to allow his primary subject full attention. For example, as ‘the poetic word stands alone against an impoverished reality’ marked by the ‘modern collapse of metaphysical certainties’ (p. 16), we may think of Wallace Stevens’s defence of a ‘supreme fiction’ to fill the gap formed by this collapse. Miłosz’s defence of poetry as an instrument for communicating and reaching transcendence appears rather late in the twentieth century, but begs to be situated within an aestheticist context that the poet himself may have repudiated but appears tenaciously relevant. A brief comparative glance at similar poets and thinkers would not be out of place, perhaps, but would blur the sharp focus of this analysis. Indeed, the chapter on poetry and rhythm does an excellent job of showcasing Mi...