CZESLAW MILOSZ
17
worse, unwilling to realize it. If one is a slave, humiliated, slapped on the
face, filled with hate but impotent, the experience marks him forever. Slave
raids in Africa and the institution of slavery were recreated on the
European continent, except that they were directed against white men,
those slaves being forced, in addition, to watch when their neighbors, also
white, were killed, while it was forbidden to intervene under penalty of
death. Stanislaw did not know and did not try to learn what his parents
felt when they had to turn their eyes away from the spectacle of the anni–
hilation of the Jews and to confess in their hearts that their desire to
protect themselves was stronger than compassion or decency. Every
Sunday they would go to church and somehow succeeded in patching up
contradiction . Perhaps they begged the Good Lord for forgiveness.
Father Stanislaw thought of himself as a son of people humiliated and
crushed by a police State established in the name of a utopia, first of race,
then of class. In the seminary, his curiosity was attracted by the history of
the first centuries of the Church, when Christianity most obviously was a
religion of slaves. Those who at the slightest sign of rebellion were nailed
on the crosses standing along the roads, so that their death throes testified
to the invincible power of the empire.
Father Stanislaw's dread filled him with images of suffering no human
protest or begging could avert. Heaven answered with silence the moans
of lashed serfs, the screams of crucified slaves, and the prayers of prisoners
in the twentieth-century death camps. If it was God who created this
world submitted to the blind law of force, then He was a moral monster
and it was impossible to believe in Him.
Stanislaw put his trust in God only because God delivered to torture
his only Son, in other words, Himself, and whispered in death agony with
His human lips the words of utter despair. A complete lack of logic in the
Christian religion was the only possible logic of faith. And yet Stanislaw
did not divulge to anybody his, strange for a priest, obsession. Namely, he
was unable to accept the use made of the cross. The faithful would carry
around in their churches an instrument of torture as a sign of Salvation,
without seeing on it a body contorted in unbearable pain, as if one could
be a Christian only by renouncing empathic imagination . By changing the
crucifix into abstraction, they also stripped of reality the body on the gal–
lows or in the gas chamber,just so that they did not have to recognize that
a religion of a crucified God is a religion of cosmic pain.
Translated from the Polish
by
the author and Robert Hass
