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PARTISAN REVIEW
simplifying the human world into what Blake called the land of
Ulro.
Ulro is "the land of the disinherited," "a land where man is
reduced to a supererogatory number, worse, where he becomes as
much for himself, in his own eyes, in his own mind." Following
Blake, Milosz sees the beginnings of the process of such disinheri–
tance in the Age of Enlightenment with its fundamentally wrong
decision to put all of mankind's hopes in the triumphs of science and
reason . The times of Bacon, Locke and Newton witnessed the first
signs of a rapidly widening rift between the inner world of the
human imagination and the outer world of science's abstract laws.
The ensuing romantic crisis of European culture , which has con–
tinued to our time, has been, in Milosz's view, a phenomenon con–
tained within the walls of the land of Ulro; only a handful of pro–
phetic seers have attempted, in both literature and philosophy, to
seek some effective way out, usually at the risk of being perceived as
"abnormal," incomprehensible or excessively mystical.
But how do their efforts relate to the question of
unde malum?
One common denominator Milosz finds between these thinkers and
his own intellectual inclinations is the notion of anthropocentrism
combined with a "bias against Nature." In other words, those who
try to bring down the walls of Ulro must consider man the center of
the universe while being perfectly aware that there is no such thing
as innate human goodness. Nature is not a harmoniously working
mechanism, as the deists of the Age of Enlightenment liked to imag–
ine it, nor is it a refuge from the troubles of civilization, as post–
Rousseau romantics tended to think. On the contrary, Nature, in–
cluding human nature, is branded by the unavoidable presence of
evil. Whoever realizes this must deem it
impossibl~
to create any
system of ethics free of religious sanctions. The only way to create an
intellectual space which a human society could inhabit is to reconcile
the presence of evil with the notion of a providential plan by in–
troducing the idea of "Godmanhood." Not deified man, but just the
opposite, humanized God, is the concept through which we can "as–
sent to our existence on earth ." Within such a vision, Christ, as in
Swedenborg, becomes identical with God the Father and the mo–
ment of Creation is simultaneous with that of the Crucifixion ; the
God who created the world with all its evil and suffering is the God
who also agreed to participate in our pain, who "took on a human
form and willingly died the death of a tortured prisoner."
Swedenborg, Blake, Mickiewicz, Dostoevsky, O. W . Milosz
