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Eliot and Faith

What I mean instead is that I think Eliot never did truly believe and that his poetry is not about faith’s wait for God but about the hollow man’s wait for faith. Of course, he probably did believe, and many accounts of personal encounters with the poet describe the deep humility and sincerity of his […]

What I mean instead is that I think Eliot never did truly believe and that his poetry is not about faith’s wait for God but about the hollow man’s wait for faith. Of course, he probably did believe, and many accounts of personal encounters with the poet describe the deep humility and sincerity of his faith. What we encounter in his late poetry, however, is a profound confusion of faith with a brilliant and learned man’s rational understanding that he needs to have faith. It may not have been a confusion in his personal life of prayer, but it is an obvious confusion in his published poetry. And it is still more obvious in his social criticism in The Idea of A Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. Even at his most devout, Eliot sees religion instrumentally-not as Plato’s “Noble Lie,” of course, instilled in the simple people but disbelieved by the elite, but as a sort of “Noble Truth,” instilled in the simple people so that the society may continue but believed in a delicate, ironic, and aesthetic way by the elite. In the anglophilia, misjudged irony, and grotesque delicacy of the worst line Eliot ever wrote-the Magi who have seen the Christ-child reporting, “it was (you may say) satisfactory”-we encounter a spirituality so crippled by its self-consciousness that it testifies only to a mistake in the poet’s understanding of faith.

And the mistake originates in the philosophical moves Eliot makes in “The Hollow Men” and extends in “Ash-Wednesday.” The failure of modernity rests on the misguided attempt to found philosophical certainty on the self’s consciousness of itself, and Eliot rightly sees modernity’s failure. But his answer is to force himself to rise to consciousness of his self-consciousness-and then, when he finds that selflessness is not found there, to force himself to rise to consciousness of his self-consciousness of his self-consciousness-and then, when he finds that selflessness is not found there, to force himself to rise . . . -and then. . . . St. Augustine walked this path in the Confessions, and it drove him mad. The notion seems to be that, because we are finite, we cannot (in the real psychology of thought) follow self-consciousness to its apparent infinity; we cannot be infinitely self-conscious. Eventually, at the limit of our thought, we must arrive at a consciousness of which we cannot be self-conscious. Eventually we must arrive at a pure, selfless act of thought that may thereby think the true philosophical foundation of the self.

The path of self-consciousness, however, may be walked only if desire is stronger than reason, only if the will goes on longer than the intellect. The thinker who grows tired and leaps to the conclusion of the apparent infinity of self-consciousness has let reason triumph over weak desire. Augustine falls further and further into self-willed madness as he advances further and further into self-willed self-consciousness, and at last (in a garden as the Confessions tells the story) he converts by the grace of God from madness to that pure and selfless act he sought. But it is a pure and selfless act of will and not of intellect. Augustine becomes an unthinking, irrational, and motiveless desire for the Will of God. And when a child’s voice- saying, “Take up and read”-wafts over the garden wall, Augustine drifts as gently as a leaf across the garden and over to the table where he finds the letters of St. Paul.~Joseph Bottum, First Things, August/September 1995

This old, rather odd 1995 article is representative of what we can expect from Mr. Bottum’s brand of ‘conservatism’. Mr. Bottum was, of course, more than welcome to dislike Eliot’s poetry (many people do find it impenetrable or bizarre), and since he is a poet and I am assuredly not I will not make this a complaint about his technical observations about the poems themselves. The complaints about the poems are not much more than a screen to attack Mr. Eliot’s faith. Mr. Bottum very clearly does not claim to question his faith in his everyday life, which he cannot deny, so he hunts an even bigger prize by denying his poetry its place as a vessel of Christian meaning as set down in the language of a modern man.

As Mr. Bottum concludes:

“This is not faith’s difficult search for understanding, but understanding’s impossible search for faith. And all that remains for the poet is a delicate, aesthetic, self-conscious almost-spirituality-a detached and wistful watching of himself, watching himself, watching.”

Even after briefly granting that a poem such as Ash Wednesday is a poetic success and is suffused with a living spirituality, Mr. Bottum proceeds to cast down his subsequent poetry as a calcification of that spirit. But this will not do. Someone who has written the concluding lines of Ash Wednesday cannot be disregarded as a rationalist seeking to understand his way to God. If Mr. Bottum finds the other works lacking, he will have to question, if he dares, Eliot’s knack for poetry and not the spirit expressed in the poems. Let the reader judge for himself if this is, as Bottum says, “a poem not so much about God as prayer for God, and not so much about prayer as about the effort of the poet to put himself in the attitude of prayer.”

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.
-T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

What strikes the reader at once about Mr. Bottum’s article is the ever so post-modern (ironic) penchant for demystifying and discrediting respected figures, and what could be more iconoclastic than belittling the spiritual vision of the 20th century English-language poet most noted for his Christian spiritual vision? Many real and pretend conservatives feel the need to develop a ‘clever’ or slightly ‘subversive’ take on some notable figure or event in the past, as if eccentricity and idiosyncracy were virtues rather than peculiarities. Mr. Bottum’s slight against Eliot is no different, but I can see that many may eventually fall for this revision of Eliot precisely by stealing from him his reputation as a transmitter of spiritual meaning and his role as a prodigy of modern Christian imagination. Could we also expect to debunk C.S. Lewis’ faith because he delved so thoroughly into pagan myth and fantasy, or perhaps mock the spirit of Tolkien for being too Nordic? To find Eliot’s poetry lacking in expression of faith because of its irony and sense of dislocation is just that sort of perverse denial of the very thing that makes Eliot’s work noteworthy and special as the artistic creation of a Christian man.

It is not without significance for this topic that Russell Kirk’s revised Conservative Mind incorporated a chapter specifically on Eliot, and that the “crippled” and “self-conscious” spirituality of Eliot that Mr. Bottum finds so troubling, indeed really quite loathsome, was nothing short of inspirational for Mr. Kirk. It is no surprise that someone who would later be quite willing to disregard Mr. Kirk’s conservatism already had such a low opinion of the spirituality of one of Mr. Kirk’s heroes. Rather than see Eliot as a sort of modern version of Ecclesiastes, Mr. Bottum has accused him of being little better than one of his hollow men, but a hollow man who is aware of the hollowness.

Mr. Bottum’s theological point, if we might call it that, or at least his anthropological point (anthropology being used here in its specifically theological application) is that Eliot rooted his faith in intellect rather than will. If we took these terms in their patristic sense, this would not be an accusation but a compliment: the ruling intellect in man (to hegemonikon as it was called by the Fathers of the Philokalia) is the controlling aspect of human nature (sometimes taken so seriously that it was identified with the image of God in which we were created) and the locus of contemplation and noetic (from Gr. nous, intellect) prayer. Will in the Cappadocian and Maximian traditions was an expression of nature, and it was the intellect that ruled and guided the will. That Eliot might well have been unfamiliar with the Cappadocians and St. Maximos is beside the point–the point is that there is an entirely legitimate patristic pedigree for privileging, if we have to speak in such terms, the intellect over the will.

Neither does the Augustinian tradition of voluntarism wholly vindicate Mr. Bottum’s claims. The logical primacy and centrality of will in Augustine is undisputed, but surely the Trinitarian psychological model that Augustine developed drives home the point that the two faculties of will and intellect should properly be seen as co-equal. If the initial movement towards God is an act of will, it is perfectly clear that in the Augustinian tradition it is the work of the intellect to contemplate God and receive knowledge of Him. Of course, this is to speak of intellect in its highest sense.

Perhaps Mr. Bottum really meant to accuse Eliot of trying to arrive at faith rationalistically, as if he were approaching the God of the philosophes or as if he were a philosophe himself. If this is what Mr. Bottum means, he simply does not see that this was not the case at all. Eliot was not trying to write or think his way to an epiphany, and the strange reason his poems are not dreary and desperate, in spite of the frequently grim nature of their themes, is that his intellect has given voice to a spirit that has already embraced the truth and submitted to God. A mind must first be illumined before it can perceive the emptiness of the world. It might be proper to end with the words of Russell Kirk: “But his poetry tells us much about the human condition, in its splendor and its misery; and his prose makes us acutely aware of the permanent things.” That seems a far more decent estimate of Eliot’s achievement in all his writings.

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