Czesław Miłosz on the Faith

Siris links to the Nobel laureate poet's remarkable 1982 essay — Catholicism. He says, rightly, that "the decision to be Catholic does not properly concern one’s faith but the submission to or the revolt against authority."

Noting that "Catholicism labored for centuries to erect a magnificent intellectual structure around the dogmas and had its theologians not formulated all man’s problems with his own existence into syllogisms," he laments that "this system, perfected in the thirteenth century (and still far from renewal, no matter what anyone says) belongs to another layer of civilization, another episteme, and that once lucid architecture is now becoming less self-evident."