The Beautiful Invisible: Jan Twardowski’s Poetic Lessons on Loving in Solitude

Love that cannot be seen
does not obscure
—Jan Twardowski, Świat

Fr. Jan Twardowski (1915-2006) may not be known in the English-speaking world as well as other Polish poets such as Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, or Karol Wojtyła. So far, only a couple of limited editions of his poems have appeared in English.[1] Although enjoying widespread acclaim in Poland due to his works’ simple style and profound content, Twardowski spoke about his poetry with extreme modesty. He did not consider himself engaged in the ancient and noble profession of poetry (poezja) but simply wrote poems (wiersze) with a sincere heart—that is, as if speaking to someone close. His poems are concise and straightforward in order to convey something important in a few sentences and with a sense of humor. This “something important” was meant to detoxify and purify the reality in which we live, thus oppose despair and introduce an order and harmony that originate in the good will. Twardowski did not shy away from difficult subjects, such as suffering, loneliness, despair, or death. However, he primarily wrote of love, hope, and faith in the context of ordinary things.

The Greatness of the Ordinary

Fr. Twardowski’s poetry often concerns ordinary things in life. In his compositions, we find a particular attentiveness to natural beings and phenomena—to flowers, trees, insects, animals, even stones—to the names they hold, the sounds they make (or do not make), the habits they have, their fate, or the apparent lack of it. The Polish poet himself recognizes this preoccupation by calling himself “John of the Ladybug” (Modlitwa do świętego Jana od Krzyża). Yet, Twardowski notes that if all you see in his poems are ladybugs, titmice, and butterflies, you see too little and incorrectly. These ordinary things, seemingly unworthy of our attention, conceal miraculous features. Indeed, Twardowski distinguishes only two approaches to life in people. The first maintains that there are no miracles in the world, and the other—that everything is a miracle. According to Twardowski, God conceals himself precisely in order for us to affirm the value of his creation. It is this invisible God who renders these ordinary beings wonderful. He hides to manifest the world and to reveal himself and his love in it precisely through this concealment (see Świat and Niewidzialne). For, as Twardowski asks, who would dare to notice anything in the world if God revealed himself in all his glory? Also, in his attention to the ordinary, Twardowski avoids referring to beings by abstract, anonymous words. Hence, he never says, “tree,” “flower,” “bird,” or “stone,” but always uses their concrete names such as “ash,” “anemone,” “blackbird,” or “granite.” His intention is not only to express the joyful abundance and complexity of creation but at the same time to show his appreciation for all the creatures and their wonderful existence simply by speaking their names.

However, the attention to the concrete in Twardowski’s poetry demonstrates a pervasive sense of sacramentality. The Polish poet seems to ask his readers not to look merely at the visible beings of the world but rather to discover the mystery of the Invisible precisely in them. He asks us to “see conversely” (see Powrót) by divesting ourselves of the prejudices formed by over-familiarity. Therefore, the Polish poet sees creation as a sort of mystery, thus neither as an epiphenomenon of God nor as a standalone phenomenon that could be exhaustively explained by scientific methods and tools. On the contrary, the visible world can (and should) be explained only in light of the mystery in which it participates. Only this sacramental vision of the world allows Twardowski to distinguish true contradictions, such as the overseasoned truth, from the apparent ones, such as God being constant and not obstinate at the same time (Odejść). Indeed, Twardowski has a unique ability to masterfully reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable extremes of the visible and the invisible, of what you can see in the world with what seems absent from it. He can even unite the apparent nonsense of life with God’s goodness, with his presence in everything. This “nonsense,” as expressed by the ordinary, includes suffering, falsehood, despair, sorrow, and so on. Therefore, Twardowski can see the good in evil things, joy in suffering, or truth in falsehood. A result of this “reconciliation” is attention to every creature, situation, and experience and, in this attention, a reception of their “friendship.”

Friendship with Creation

At this point, a poem Miłość (Love) by another Polish poet, Czesław Miłosz, comes to mind.[2] In that poem, Miłosz portrays the same attitude toward creation that we find in Twardowski. He sees things as created, that is, as possessing existence received from an other. This forms the basis for understanding oneself:

Love means to look at yourself
As we look at things foreign to us
Because you are only one of many things.

Only seen in that light can ordinary things become, in a sense, sanative for man. In other words, the consciousness of creation forms a life-affirming, life-saving dimension or attitude. Miłosz continues,

And who sees in this way [. . .]
Heals his heart from various worries
The bird and tree say to him: Friend.

Many places in Twardowski’s poems convey this beneficial friendship with creation. In Sześć listków, Twardowski puts forward a simple flower as an antidote to morbid despair.[3] When “Uncle” intends to hang himself on account of “everything being black,” the poet observes,

but this is not true
an anemone came running
and shoved up to his nose
six blue petals.

Ordinary things can also teach the human heart many other lessons about life, such as patience (see Kiedy mówisz). In his poem Ciało pedagogiczne, Twardowski lists several birds that go about their lives without paying any attention to their observer. “They care nothing for me,” he gladly concludes, recognizing that they live in their own world, with their own rhythm, silently striving to attain their own destinies. Patience is the peaceful conviction that things will eventually come to be (see Cierpliwość). This attitude is especially exigent for conversations with the Invisible. Everything matures in time, including our words, which we often consider unheard by God. “Do not pray,” Twardowski admonishes the impatient, “since you do not know how to wait” (Zaczekaj). Patience, as is linked here to humility, betrays a certain fundamental solitude in the human subject and in all things that are. This solitude seems to underlie the identity of all creatures—it expresses their incommunicability and their own value in relation to God. Thus, this solitude is not a cause of despair. Quite the contrary, it is an invitation to life and love, an invitation to the awareness that man belongs not so much to the world, to another human person, or even to himself, as to God.

Accordingly, the first lesson that Fr. Twardowski offers is the courage to notice the ordinary and learn from it amid the world that prizes the unprecedented, the dazzling, and the scandalous. Another lesson accompanying the first is this: notice the greatness of the ordinary. Paying attention is the first step on the way to the proper attitude toward creation. “The detail confers greatness on everything that is small,” the poet says in the poem Wielkie i małe. It seems that his attention to the small provides the means for him to contemplate the great and, ultimately, the greatest—the Invisible. All the attributes of the ordinary in the natural world relate to this great Invisible and vice versa. Therefore, this Great One is also small (see W jarzębinach). This insight coincides with the famous metaphysical passages from St. Augustine (Confessions, Book III) and St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae I, q. 8, a. 1) concerning God’s presence in beings. Aquinas finds God in all things in a most intimate manner, while St. Augustine confesses God’s presence in himself as “more interior to my innermost and greater to my highest.” How can someone so great and completely transcendent, someone who exists in a totally different mode of being than us-creatures, be able and willing to dwell in the smallness of our hearts, in the insignificance of contingent, transitory beings?—we might ask. Twardowski wishes to convey the truth that authentic greatness is not afraid of smallness and that smallness is able to express greatness (Taki mały). One must be really great not to be afraid or ashamed of one’s transitoriness, insignificance, and invisibility. Perhaps what the Polish poet wishes to say is that greatness or significance is visible only by comparison, whereas smallness or invisibility retains its own value outside any reference.

The “Smallness” of God

At this point, the teaching of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger comes to mind. In his Introduction to Christianity,[4] the German thinker sees God’s greatness in his attention to the smallest and his ability to enter into the seemingly insignificant. In reference to the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, Ratzinger recognizes that the true greatness of God consists in God’s reaching down to and indwelling in the smallest (not to be encompassed by the greatest but by the smallest is divine). In the Christian understanding of reality, the reversal of the value of the greatest and the smallest is typical. God loves the small and constantly searches for them. Recalling the biblical stories of the lost sheep or the lost drachma (Luke 15:4-10) confirms the point.

This reversal of value is not an irrational upheaval where what should be valued more is valued less and vice versa. Rather, this reversal aligns our vision and appreciation with the genuine hierarchy of values or, in other words, an ethos—the Christian ethos, to be precise. Again, this new hierarchy manifests not only the value of the ordinary but also the truth about God himself. Max Scheler describes this perception of the new ethos in most memorable terms as a reversal in the movement of love. Love is not so much an aspiration of the lower towards the higher as a condescension through self-renunciation in which what is noble, healthy, wealthy, and good stoops down to the vulgar, the sick, the poor, and the sinful. Complementing or even correcting the ancient view of God as merely the First Mover, Scheler says,

God is no longer the eternal unmoving goal—like a star—for the love of all things, moving the world as “the beloved moves the lover.” Now the very essence of God is to love and serve.[5]

However, this “servile” proximity to the small and insignificant comes with a price—a total relinquishment of power and, as a result, a vulnerability. This “price” of self-relinquishment should not be surprising for anyone who loves, for the lover, in some sense, remains at the mercy of the beloved for accepting and returning his love. That divine vulnerability is precisely what Twardowski perceives in the invisibility of God in relation to the ordinary. Here is one more quote from Ratzinger, reflecting on the facts of the birth of Jesus and his death: “The highest power is demonstrated as the calm willingness to renounce all power.”[6] Fr. Twardowski expresses the same thought by saying that “when the Almighty loves, he knows how to be the weakest” (Co prosi o miłość). Genuine love entails this vulnerability of self-renunciation, as it were, for the sake of the beloved. In other words—and in the context of creation—this vulnerability takes the form of invisibility. It also takes the form of suffering, as we see in Christ’s encounter with the world. Hence, to the question about the meaning of suffering, Twardowski offers his response in the context of the Lord’s Passion: we suffer so that life becomes love.

Here, I need to stress again that all the natural world Twardowski writes about is creation, that is, a work of a Creator in which he is present in one way or another, but not identical with it. Consider this presence explained in Twardowski’s poem Wiersz z dedykacją:

Again, the Lord God loves the frog not because it croaks,
the frog croaks because the Lord God loves it.

The proper use of analogy here is breathtaking and coincides with that of Thomas Aquinas and Augustine. In his Summa theologiae (I, q. 13, a. 2), St. Thomas says that “it does not follow that God is good because he causes goodness; but rather, on the contrary, he causes goodness in things because he is good.” Even more aligned to Twardowski is St. Augustine’s statement (from De Trinitate, book 15, chapter 4) that God knows all spiritual and bodily creatures not because they are, but because he knows them, therefore they are. While Thomas’s focus rests on God’s essential attributes, Twardowski attends creation as existing thanks to this divine goodness—or, we could even venture to say, in this goodness. Within this hermeneutics (of the gift), we recognize the cosmos with its inhabitants as being bestowed from someone who loves, and it is precisely this someone’s love that providentially guides everything. Twardowski frequently calls this providence “invisible hands” (see Koniec, Powrót, Wdzięczność, and Jeszcze). Consequently, the ontic structure itself of all creation as loved declares its origin and reason for it to love, thereby bestowing on every creature a unique value and proper motivation for action. One could say that they all act out of love, which by no means contradicts their freedom. Quite the contrary.

The Task of Being Invisible

However, as I indicated above, a crucial aspect of this creaturely smallness is God’s concealment or his invisibility that this creatureliness entails or, better, enjoys. This invisibility of God is one of the recurring themes in Twardowski’s poems and one of his greatest lessons.

God is so great that he is and is not
so almighty that he can not be,

the poet states in Nieobecny jest. These lines demonstrate how well the Polish poet works the counterpoint—how well he uses the “language of paradoxes” to express the mystery of life. Precisely this invisibility of God is the source of tension in all creatures and their existential “uncertainty” or “anxiety.” Surprisingly, for Twardowski, this invisibility reveals God’s presence in the world in which he remains absent. Created beings and their inter-relations cannot help but betray this presence (“The one who is loved is still invisible” [Kłopoty zakochanych]), if only one is sufficiently attentive to see it. Twardowski saw that every encounter with creation in this life is a “boundary experience,” to borrow a phrase from John Paul II. It is “boundary” because, in some implicit manner, it touches the reality that is otherwise invisible, unattainable, and unreconstructible. Ultimately, to be “sufficiently attentive” here means the ability to reconcile the solitude of absence (including the horror of suffering) with the providence of love. It appears that solitude is so closely connected with love precisely because the nature of God entails invisibility and freedom (which continue after the Incarnation). This Invisible himself causes that connection. For us, God is a loving solitude, a solitude in love, and a love that is alone because it is invisible. Therefore, invisibility is a mark of true love—a mark of “a creative freedom,” to use a Ratzingerian phrase. For this reason, Twardowski claims that without solitude, true love does not exist (Nie rozdzielaj). Because Twardowski links solitude with one’s belonging to God, we can now conclude that to love in solitude means to love with God.

The presence of the Invisible in his creation induces self-reflection and self-understanding. In the world that manifests this presence in absence, I—a human person—stand as the more or less conscious recipient and instrument of divine manifestation in and through creation. Accordingly, everything—things, events, acts, values, relations, and so on—reveals God’s love. “God loves you through a cordial letter that came” and “through rain that rang in your ear” and “through somebody who forbade you to frown” and “through the heart screaming from the cross” (Najbliżej). In other words, “God loves me through you” (Napisałaś). This is the secret to understanding the greatness of ordinary things and all the everyday happenings around us. God loves me through them all and in this way leads me to himself—he does so through a hopping sparrow in the street, through a melting snowflake on my nose, through a croaking frog during rain, and even through my experiences of pain, suffering, loneliness, and death. This seems to be why the poet values natural phenomena above art (Coś więcej). Therefore, it is not surprising that Twardowski sees himself as one through whom (or, better, in whom) God offers his friendship to all others. “I myself did not do the good,” he confesses in Prośba, as it was the angel who gave out gifts “at times through my hands.” In other words, to be a gift in this sense brings one closer to God, unites one with his will, and makes one “invisible.” The awareness of this invisibility of the giver (lover) entails a certain humility that rids the world of the visible appearances that often deceive. “To become invisible does not harm anyone,” Twardowski confesses (in Takie proste), as it is precisely the invisibility of the Invisible that makes the world true and beautiful. In other words, God is the source of beauty, and I become beautiful by sharing in his invisibility present in the world.

This practical application of the analogy between the Invisible God and a concrete human person seems to be another remarkable lesson that Fr. Twardowski’s poems afford us. To become “invisible”—as is God who works in the world through his invisible hands—means to share in his invisibility, that is, his solitude. Such sharing ennobles not only the world itself, giving glory to the Father (see Matt 5:16), but also elevates the human subject, who, paradoxically, discovers the value of his existence precisely in “not being.” To better understand how this invisible subject appears in the world, let me offer Twardowski’s three stages of spiritual life (based on his poem W kolejce do nieba). In the first stage, “you must look like a saint but not be one.” In the next stage, one ought to “neither be a saint nor look like one.” The final stage demands that one “be a saint and not be seen at all.” Only then does a saint start to resemble a saint because only then does he love with a pure love—the love that is pure service. And only then does our saint become truly visible, truly beautiful, and truly himself. We could also call this invisibility “transparency.” In his poem Przeźroczystość, Twardowski asks for such transparency for himself, concluding, “so that only You are seen.”[7]

The Last Word on Beauty

By reflecting on the meaning of the invisibility of the ordinary and that of God and man in the context of love and faith (sacramentality!), we have indirectly been discussing beauty. One of the most profound and striking statements about the visible world is Twardowski’s definition of beauty. According to him, beauty is simply God’s absence (non-presence) (Piękno, ale tyle widać). Another Polish poet, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, captures Twardowski’s idea of beauty with the words that beauty is the form of love (Promethidion).[8] We all might be familiar with various other definitions of beauty, both classic and modern, which all seem insufficient to capture beauty’s essence. They often focus on the consequences of the encounter with the beautiful without reaching the essence of beauty. By his “discovery” of the invisible, Twardowski shows the reason for the ineffability of beauty—why we cannot grasp and possess the beautiful as our own, that is, why “beauty teaches us that we cannot have” (Za nogę), why beauty eludes our comprehension. Things in themselves are like wax on which the invisible ring left its impression and, for this reason, they claim our admiration. Of course, this is just an analogy that is meant to show how the heart can be impressed on by the beloved, that is, how the invisible is linked to the visible. Perhaps the last lesson that we can derive from Twardowski’s concept of beauty is that the source of human happiness lies outside of human life. Both beauty and solitude attest to this fact, to the invisible presence of God.

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