Like Kierkegaard: “As far as I am concerned, I am able to describe most excellently the movements of faith; but I cannot make them myself.” The Danish philosopher’s famous essay Fear and Trembling is a rumination on the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. God asked Abraham to kill Isaac, Abraham’s long-awaited and cherished son, and in the essay Kierkegaard grapples with how an act of murder can become a pleasing, good, and holy act in the eyes of God. It takes faith, a faith Kierkegaard minutely examines and describes, but one that he cannot in the end claim for himself, as devout as he is. He remains what he dubs a knight of resignation, a state that, for all it is worth, is still a state of sin. To be sure, I am “using” Miłosz here for my own purposes. He knows perfectly well he is not a saint. In an interview he has stated—and proved—that he is a man of contradiction. In other words, an ordinary man. But I admire his insistence on an objective reality, his faith in a world and an order that does not exist exclusively in the mind.

Milosz might explain that he had the advantage -- not given to Kierkagaard and Ruefle -- of living under Marxist-Leninist oppression.  He wrote, "It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism."

In my time and place the diminished reach of rationalism seems the greater threat. But I can imagine, based on the limits of my own rationality, the deadening effect of a wholly rational experience: even if only as disciplined effort and aspiration.

How is it then that life under the Communists produced such life-affirming artists, writers, and poets, while a quarter-century of "freedom" and prosperity has produced mostly nihilism?