Czeslaw Milosz's Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity

Description

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. Cover Czesław Miłosz’s Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity Copyright Acknowledgments Contents List of Abbreviations Introduction: The Mystery of the Body 1: Beyond the Body: Reinventing Transcendence 1. Miłosz and the Death of God 2. “Meaning”: The Mission of Poetry 3. The Roots of Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century 4. The Task of Literature: Reaching for Transcendence 5. Soaring over the Earth: The Self as Consciousness 6. Miłosz’s Manichaeism: The Immaterial Spark of the Self 7. The Dangers of Dualism 2: The Totalitarian Self: Consciousness in the Trap of the Body 1. The Divided Self 2. “The Accuser”: Hatred of the Flesh 3. The Mirror of Consciousness and the Thing of the Body 4. Old Age and the Dying Body 5. The Self and the Universal Flesh of the Other 6. The Totalitarian Self 7. Overcoming Excarnation 3: The Embodied Self: Corporeal Sources of Religious Experience 1. Return to the Body 2. “I love the movement of my blood”: The Body as Essence of the Self 3. Rehabilitating the Body: Historical Perspectives 4. The Believing Body 5. The Emotion of Wonder and the Religious Instinct 6. Morality and Meaning in the Body 7. Alienation and the Incarnate God 8. The Limits of Embodied Spirituality 4: The Fluid Self: Woman, Body, and the Flesh of the World 1. Miłosz’s “Feminism” 2. “The Same Other”: Woman in the Mirror 3. “There is No Me”: The Poetry of Anna Świrszczyńska 4. Feminine Subjectivity and the Wisdom of the Body 5. Miłosz and the Semiotic 6. Fluids and the Form of the Self 7. Erotic Intersubjectivity and the Divine 8. A Mixed Identity 5: Poetry and the Body: The Meaning of Rhythm and the Rhythm of Meaning 1. The Lever of Contradiction 2. Miłosz’s Struggle against Rhythm 3. Metrical Rhythm: Patterns of Accent and Stress 4. Sense Rhythm: Patterns of Syntax and Breath 5. Rhythm and “the Real” 6. Poetic Language and the Weakening of the Self 7. Poetry, Ritual, and Transcendence 8. The Human Cathedral Conclusion: Belief in the Body Works Cited Works by Czesław Miłosz Critical Works Other Works Index