CZESLAW MILOSZ
19
reading Simon Dubnov, a historian of Jews in Russia, who describes his
conversion to Jewish nationalism at the end of the last century. Allow
me to quote from him: "I myself have lost faith in personal immortality,
yet history teaches me that there is collective immortality and that the
Jewish people can be considered as relatively eternal, for its history
coincides with the full span of world history. The study of the Jewish
people's past, then, also encompasses me in something eternal. This
historicism admitted me into the national collective, drawing me out of
the circle of personal problems onto the broad highway of social
problems, less profound but more timely. National sorrow became dearer
to me than the sorrow of the world." Dubnov lost his religious faith,
but paradoxically this prompted him to believe in collective immortality.
A faithfulness to one nation may be endowed with a religious aura,
especially when the religious beliefs are weakened or eroded. When re–
flecting on contemporary literature in Poland, I have an uncanny feeling
that in spite of the importance and the high caliber of the Roman
Catholic Church in that country, there is something like an erosion of
religious faith on a deeper level, much as is visible in the West and in
neighboring Hungary and Czechoslovakia. I ask myself whether, in its
shift to patriotism, Polish literature doesn't show symptoms of agnosti–
cism or atheism. The central locus of the sacred is moving from the reli–
gious sphere to the political sphere of a nation fighting for its indepen–
dence. Utter skepticism and an awareness of the relativity of values are
combined in that literature with an attachment to one absolute: an un–
conditional loyalty to one's nation. By saying this I do not intend to
maintain that mass participation in Church rites and in pilgrimages in
Poland is basically a political phenomenon. Yet the sacred bears a double
character of attachment: to the Christian faith and to parents, grandpar–
ents, and ancestors who lived and died in the same faith.
*
The problem of religion in our part of Europe is closely connected
with that of nationalism, and in fact, it is sometimes difficult to separate
religion from intense national feelings. The issue is of great complexity,
and when we treat it from a purely religious point of view, it shows
some unsolvable puzzles. Of course, Christian churches are primarily con–
cerned with the salvation of the individual human soul and, in view of
that aim, establish a certain hierarchy of commitments. An individual lives
in a family, a family belongs to a certain community, which by the fact
of language is a national community.
It
often happens that a national
bond protects certain values which otherwise wouldn't survive under the
