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were thinkers who, for all their human limitations and errors, had
enough visionary power to give the notion of divine humanity or
"Godmanhood" pride of place in their systems of thought - even to
the point of, in Dostoevsky's radical phrase, "choosing Christ over
truth" (i.e . , over the abstract truth of science). Our century, on the
other hand , is viewed by Milosz as living proof of "the utter failure of
secular humanism, a failure sponsored by the very successes of that
same humanism." Ours is the world disinherited of values, the world
whose inner void can be - and is - too easily filled with worthless
and often antihuman ideological substitutes. The road of Dostoev–
sky's Grand Inquisitor seems to be taken time and again.
Such a diagnosis does not mean, though, that Milosz readily
dismisses every form of agnosticism or atheism as simply disguises
for ethical relativism . On the contrary, his polemic with Witold
Gombrowicz - which makes an extremely illuminative reading not
onl
y
for the student of Polish literature - shows that he fully ap–
preciates the kind of atheism which is "bound by the strictest ethical
code" exactly because it does not admit the possibility of divine in–
tervention or posthumous reparation. "Morally speaking," says
Milosz, "there is nothing, in my view, which argues either for Chris–
tians or against atheists ( . .. ) I would even say that if someone can
be an atheist, he ought to be one ." Would that mean, in turn, that
religion can be reduced to the role of a means of intellectual self–
defense against an ethical void? Such a concept of religion, albeit
theologically rather unorthodox, seems indeed to be quite close to
Milosz's views. In fact, his book is a treatise on what Blake called
"Divine Works of the Imagination"; it finds a possible remedy to the
modern crisis of Christian civilization not merely in a reanimation of
the religious spirit but , more demandingly, in broadening the sphere
of imagination and thus reclaiming the abandoned space of the
human world.
It is to be expected that
The Land
oj UITo
will stir up a great deal
of controversy among its American readers. Some of this book's con–
cepts - such as the theocracy mentioned a few times as a possible
model for societies of tomorrow - are indeed highly unpopular in
this country's intellectual tradition. I myself am rather unconvinced,
to
say the least, by Milosz's overly categorical criticism of what he
calls "secular humanism."
It
would be unfortunate, however, if such
controversial details veiled in the readers' perception the more essen–
tial issues raised by his brilliant defense of the imagination and its
humanizing power . The central problem of this book - the question
