Czeslaw Milosz's faith in the flesh : body, belief, and human identity

This book presents Czesław Miłosz's poetic philosophy of the body as an original defense of religious faith, transcendence, and the value of the human individual against what he viewed as dangerous modern forms of materialism. The Polish Nobel laureate saw the reductive "biologization" of human life as a root cause of the historical tragedies he had witnessed under Nazi German and Soviet regimes in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe. The book argues that his response was not merely to reconstitute spiritual or ideal forms of human identity, which no longer seemed plausible. Instead, he aimed to revalidate the flesh, elaborating his own non-reductive understandings of the self on the basis of the body's deeper meanings. Within the framework of a hesitant Christian faith, Miłosz's poetry and prose often suggest a paradoxical striving toward transcendence precisely through sensual experience. Yet his perspectives on bodily existence are not exclusively affirmative. The book traces his diverse representations of the body from dualist visions that demonize the flesh through to positive images of the body as the source of religious experience, the self, and his own creative faculty. It also examines the complex relations between "masculine" and "feminine" bodies or forms of subjectivity, as Miłosz represents them. Finally, it elucidates his contention that poetry is the best vehicle for conveying these contradictions, because it also combines "disembodied", symbolic meanings with the sensual meanings of sound and rhythm. For Miłosz, the double nature of poetic meaning reflects the fused duality of the human self. -- From publisher's website Cover 1 Czesław Miłosz’s Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity 4 Copyright 5 Acknowledgments 6 Contents 8 List of Abbreviations 10 Introduction: The Mystery of the Body 12 1: Beyond the Body: Reinventing Transcendence 19 1. Miłosz and the Death of God 19 2. “Meaning”: The Mission of Poetry 22 3. The Roots of Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century 29 4. The Task of Literature: Reaching for Transcendence 35 5. Soaring over the Earth: The Self as Consciousness 39 6. Miłosz’s Manichaeism: The Immaterial Spark of the Self 44 7. The Dangers of Dualism 50 2: The Totalitarian Self: Consciousness in the Trap of the Body 52 1. The Divided Self 52 2. “The Accuser”: Hatred of the Flesh 53 3. The Mirror of Consciousness and the Thing of the Body 60 4. Old Age and the Dying Body 64 5. The Self and the Universal Flesh of the Other 67 6. The Totalitarian Self 73 7. Overcoming Excarnation 82 3: The Embodied Self: Corporeal Sources of Religious Experience 84 1. Return to the Body 84 2. “I love the movement of my blood”: The Body as Essence of the Self 86 3. Rehabilitating the Body: Historical Perspectives 93 4. The Believing Body 97 5. The Emotion of Wonder and the Religious Instinct 102 6. Morality and Meaning in the Body 107 7. Alienation and the Incarnate God 113 8. The Limits of Embodied Spirituality 117 4: The Fluid Self: Woman, Body, and the Flesh of the World 119 1. Miłosz’s “Feminism” 119 2. “The Same Other”: Woman in the Mirror 123 3. “There is No Me”: The Poetry of Anna Świrszczyńska 129 4. Feminine Subjectivity and the Wisdom of the Body 133 5. Miłosz and the Semiotic 139 6. Fluids and the Form of the Self 143 7. Erotic Intersubjectivity and the Divine 149 8. A Mixed Identity 154 5: Poetry and the Body: The Meaning of Rhythm and the Rhythm of Meaning 155 1. The Lever of Contradiction 155 2. Miłosz’s Struggle against Rhythm 157 3. Metrical Rhythm: Patterns of Accent and Stress 163 4. Sense Rhythm: Patterns of Syntax and Breath 169 5. Rhythm and “the Real” 176 6. Poetic Language and the Weakening of the Self 181 7. Poetry, Ritual, and Transcendence 184 8. The Human Cathedral 189 Conclusion: Belief in the Body 192 Works Cited 196 Works by Czesław Miłosz 196 Critical Works 198 Other Works 201 Index 208 A study of the writings of Polish laureate Czesław Miłosz perspectives on transcendence and religious belief in a secular age through creative engagement with sensual or material experience.