CZESLAW MILOSZ
177
eighteenth century and that of our time is instructive . The libretto of
the Mozart opera deals with a struggle between the darkness of
obscurantism and the light of reason; the sacred and the rational are
not separated, for the Temple, in other words, the Freemasonic
lodge, bestows sacral features on the human mind in search of
Wisdom. That Wisdom, besides, was conceived in various ways, as
exemplified by the proliferation throughout the eighteenth century
of mystical lodges, convincingly presented in a classical work on the
subject,
Les Sources occultes du romantisme
by Auguste Viatte. In
The
Magic Flute
man wins access to the Temple after he passes through
trials and initiations . Those who do not succumb to the treacherous
charms of the Queen of the Night will find themselves among the
chosen few united by a common purpose, sharing knowledge about
how to secure happiness for the people. The opera, let us note, had
its premiere in Vienna in 1791, the year when a constitution was
voted in Warsaw, and that too was the work of Freemasons and one
of the offshoots of the French Revolution.
The people of that period seem to breathe confidence and
hope, as well as faith in the approach of a new era for humanity; for
some it seemed a millennium. Many of them would lose their heads
on the guillotine. Others would follow Napoleon, experiencing his
defeat as the end of all hope for a long time . Still others would write
programs of utopian socialism. All of thein, though, were animated
by the renewed and secularized idea expressed quite early by a
medieval monk, Joachim di Fiore, who divided history into three
epochs: the epoch of the Father, the epoch of the Son, and the epoch
to come, of the Spirit.
Even today it is still not clear what, in fact, the phenomenon
called romanticism was, especially since the term does not mean the
same in England and on the Continent and, moreover, means
different things in different European countries. Romantic poetry is
the very core of Polish literature. I grew up and completed my
studies in the city of Wilno where Polish romanticism was born,
probably not by chance, considering the peculiar character of the
Lithuanian capital. In my youth it continued to be a city of churches
and of Freemasonic lodges, and it seemed that the carriage of
Napoleon, who hG\d passed through in his march on Moscow, had
departed only yesterday. My elder university colleagues-elder by a
hundred years-founded secret organizations of the initiated, like
that in
The Magic Flute.
One of them became the greatest of Polish
poets, and I consider myself, of course, his disciple . I have come'
