The Noble Traveller - The Life and Writings of O. V. de L. Milosz

by O. V. de L. Milosz

"Transmitted by oral tradition to initiates of the Middle Ages and of modern times, Noble Traveller is the secret name of initiates of antiquity. The last time that it was pronounced in public was on May 30, 1786, in Paris at a session of Parliament devoted to the cross-examination of a famous defendant, victim of a pamphleteer, Theveneau de Morande. Initiates wanderings did not differ from ordinary travels for study except that their itinerary, though apparently haphazard, rigorously coincided with the adept s most secret aspirations and gifts." O.V. de L. Milosz, "The Arcana," Exegetic Note, verse 46 Born in 1877, Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz was a mystical poet, metaphysician, dramatist, Biblical exegete, and novelist. His roots were Lithuanian and Jewish, whereas he was educated in France and wrote in French. The Noble Traveller contains Milosz s two main works of mystical philosophy, "Ars Magna" and "The Arcana." Also a generous selection of his poetry; an extensive chronology of his life; and photographs. This volume constitutes a complete introduction to this important literary, philosophical, and spiritual writer.

Genres: Poetry, Philosophy

483 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

Reviews

[Rex · Rating 4 out of 5]

I confess I often struggle to justify to myself any interest I take in properly hermetic authors. After all, have their best insights not already been expressed by various philosophers, scientists, poets, and theologians, and with less recourse to nearly impenetrable imaginal systems and obscure dicta? Alchemy, Kabbalah, and the like are intriguing traditions, but where does one place eccentrics like O. V. de L. Milosz?

Oskar Wladyslaw Milosz (1877-1939) was an only child. His father was an atheistic Lithuanian aristocrat and his mother was Jewish, the daughter of a Hebrew teacher of Warsaw. He had a lonely upbringing on the family estate in Belarus. At twelve, his parents sent him to school in Paris. But he rebelled against the rationalism of his time and embraced the study of antiquities rather than the more prestigious sciences. He ended up a fin-de-siècle Symbolist poet and playwright, participating in the vibrant artistic scenes of prewar Paris. But he was subject to deep depression and inner turmoil, culminating in a mystical experience in 1914 that pivoted him toward hermeticism and Christianity. The Russian Revolution destroyed his family wealth, and postwar nationalism forced him to choose a citizenship. He chose his ancestral Lithuania, even though he did not speak Lithuanian, and became a decorated diplomat. In 1927, while still deep in metaphysical speculation, he started to practice Catholicism. He died shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, in retirement in Fontainebleau.

Milosz’s anti-Newtonian esotericism was an attempt to recast the world as a spiritual unity. The paradigm is put forward most clearly in his 1927 Arcana. Milosz believed (even prior to his encounter with Einstein) that time and space are relative, products of universal movement, the blood and rhythm of the cosmos. Thought is the sensation of this movement. Space-time-matter was created by an unspeakable act of divine sacrifice, by which God, the Interior, in love produced the exterior or nothing. Man’s primitive awareness spanned this nothing and totally identified the microcosm with the macrocosm; so the whole universe was his body. The Fall, if I understand Milosz correctly, hinged on a shift in man’s understanding of the nothing. This nothing was a means of union between creature and Creator. Man fell when, under the influence of sensuous perception, he invoked the Nothing directly. Space became an infinite container of matter over which man could assert his will. Time became pointless infinite duration. Man no longer lives in the instantaneity of divine life. Yet Milosz believed that the world would one day reunite under the Catholic Church, perhaps under the influence of a great poet to come.

Oskar Milosz invaded my imagination through the poetry and prose of his relative, Czesław Miłosz. In Czesław’s telling, not only was Oskar a visionary, but a gentle saint, of whom even animals were entirely unafraid. As he witnessed the turbulent unfolding of the twentieth century, Czesław came to regard his eccentric uncle as a kind of new William Blake, a prophet and rebel against the captivity of the world to ugly mechanical imagination. Oskar Milosz implanted in him a profound belief in the ideal, and hence that dissatisfaction in worldly imperfection which accompanied the younger Miłosz for the rest of his life. Czesław, who directly witnessed many of the worst atrocities of his century, was deeply conscious of this. And it is here that I find common feeling. Thinking like an idealist while being forced to live as a pragmatist wounds the soul. Yet as Czesław recognized, we need dreams of apocatastasis in a heavy age. We need our Blakes and Miloszes who can see rebirth and utopia even through the apparent downward spiritual spiral of modernity.

[Judy]

For me the early poetry and the man were more interesting than the mysticism. In fact, my partial refection of him might be seen in the fact that I read most of it on the treadmill. I figured that reason wasn't really required since the words seemed to float. Of course, I was somewhat offended by references to Judaism and women. His language, however, is at times very rich and resonant, even in translation. When Milosz' family fortune was lost in the Russian Revolution, he became a diplomat in the Lithuanian delegation. "One day an official at the Quai d'Orsay told me that they entire {French} ministry was astounded at the remarkable literary style of the correspondence emerging from the Lithuanian delegation: 'Never have we seen notes written in so perfect a style,' he told me 'and for a long time we asked ourselves what this Lithuanian could be from which even the most banal notes were written in so remarkable a style. When we knew it was Milosz, we understood.' " p. 460
Milosz used to spend his vacations at Fontainebleau: he "spoke the language of birds, of various species, which arrived at his call, alighting on his shoulders and hands. Of all the park's regular visitors, this solitary man was the only one whom the birds admitted into such intimacy." p.28
Romanticism was a reaction against the rational approach of Descartes.

[Sean Murray · Rating 3 out of 5]

He is rather derivative. Very little in here was truly original ; he uses cryptic disguises for the names of his influences in a childish manner. His mystical revelations were all common knowledge long before his flowery lines, many of which are nonsense