July 2023 Print

By Dr. Matthew Childs

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning…

In a previous article about T.S. Eliot’s poetry between the two world wars of the last century, I provided an overview of his work, arguing that it is more hopeful than it may initially seem and, more importantly, that we can see the corpus of his work as sacramental, an outward sign of the subtle but insistent action of Providence upon the soul of the artist, because his work is surprisingly consistent in form and vision, growing in clarity more than changing in kind. This commentary is a focused look at Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism and how it affected his poetry. The nature of his faith, rather than the biographical details of Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism, is the subject of this inquiry because interested Catholic readers wonder why he is not Roman Catholic. A brief consideration of his poetry demonstrates not only how it was affected by his conversion, but also how his later work confirms an important truth about good art while manifesting the Catholic understanding of justification, of the way grace operates upon our fallen nature.

Eliot was born into a Unitarian family—his grandfather was a minister who had moved from Boston to St. Louis “to establish the faith in the frontier wilderness”¹—but Eliot abandoned it fairly early on, and later described it “as a bland and insufficient heresy… earnest, intellectual, humanitarian, part of that high-minded ‘ethical culture’ which Eliot in later years distrusted and mocked.”² Eliot entered the Church of England on June 29, 1927, in a private—even secret—ceremony that wasn’t made generally known until the following year.³ Initial responses to his conversion varied depending upon how well people knew him, but the general reaction from “the world” was the predictable mix of unpleasant surprise and patronizing disgust. Eliot himself provided some commentary on the response of many to his religious turn: “I can only describe [a reviewer’s comments] as a flattering obituary notice… I had suddenly arrested my progress—whither he had supposed me to be moving I do not know… I had failed… what is more, I was a kind of traitor; and of those who were to find their way to the promised land beyond the waste one might drop a tear at my absence from the roll-call of the new saints.”⁴ For those who prefer to see only desolation in Eliot’s poetry because it confirms a godless, modernist world view, the reaction is understandable, but for those who can see the underlying hope in the poetry his conversion only makes sense. In fact, the poet of The Waste Land had been moving toward Christianity for many years. Although Eliot dropped Unitarianism early on, he always longed for certainty, finding it in “classicism” in art and seeing the possibility of it in Christianity, specifically Catholicism, more than a decade before his conversion: “he was instinctively drawn to the spectacle of the organized Church: his extension lectures of 1916 had suggested that a ‘classicist in art and literature’ (the sphere in which he placed himself) would be likely to ‘adhere… to the Catholic Church.’”⁵ The bottom line is that Eliot’s conversion did not result in a complete repudiation of his former artistic vision but a completion of it, “a new world/ And the old made explicit, understood/ In the completion of its partial ecstasy,” as described in Four Quartets. Otherwise stated, “Eliot’s… reception into the English Church in 1927 and his public declaration of his faith… were the culmination of many years of searching, both within Christianity and well beyond it…”⁶ Eliot’s own assessment of the transition in a 1936 letter summarizes it the best: “I think what appears to another person to be a change of attitude and even a recantation of former views must often appear to the author himself rather as part of a continuous and more or less consistent development.”⁷ This description matches the effects of the conversion on his poetry, which is not transformed but completed.

Eliot, well before his conversion, acknowledged that someone with his proclivities would be likely to “adhere to the Catholic Church,” but by the time he converted to Christianity, he had added a qualifier to his Catholicism in his now famous 1928 proclamation that he was a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.”⁸ On the verge of his conversion, in 1926, a friend of Eliot’s, seeing his profound desire for “certainty,” wrote “he should just make a blind act of faith and join the Catholic Church: there he will find an authority and a tradition”;⁹ but that didn’t quite happen. It is difficult to say exactly why Eliot stopped short of Rome, but there are some strong indicators. One was Rome’s condemnation in 1926 of Charles Maurras, the leader of Action Française, whom Eliot very much supported. Maurras was condemned “for, in effect, valuing the Catholic Church primarily as an organ of political stability while minimizing the spiritual reality of the church, the faith itself.”¹⁰ Although the case against Maurras was “manifestly just, for he never made any secret of the fact that he regarded Christ as little more than a dangerous Jewish upstart,”¹¹ Eliot still defended Maurras for his political efforts. It is significant that Eliot began instruction in the Church of England only one month after the condemnation. Additionally, according to his biographer, Eliot felt the Roman Catholic Church “smacked of republicanism and the Boston Irish,”¹² but it seems more likely Eliot was less repulsed by Rome than drawn by England. In his 1931 “Thoughts After Lambeth,” a commentary on the 1930 international meeting of Anglican bishops, he wrote “two thousand years has gone to [the Church’s] formation,” referring to the Church of England, “not dating” it, as William Turn Levy notes, “from the Reformation.”¹³ The critical insight to Eliot’s distinction between the Church of Rome and that of England comes by way of his discussion of their “radically different” positions on marriage and birth control which “[indicate] a radical difference between the Anglican and Roman views on other matters”:

To put it frankly, but I hope not offensively, the Roman view in general seems to me to be that a principle must be affirmed without exception; and that thereafter exceptions can be dealt with, without modifying the principle. The view natural to the English mind, I believe, is rather that a principle must be framed in such a way as to include all allowable exceptions. It follows inevitably that the Roman Church must profess to be fixed, while the Anglican Church must profess to take account of changed conditions.¹⁴

Later he defers again to what is “natural to the English mind,” asserting that “the Anglican Church can admit national (I do not mean nationalistic) differences in theory and practice which the more formal organization of Rome cannot recognize,” and that answers to certain essential questions for English faithful “can only be found, if with hesitation and difficulty, through the English Church.”¹⁵ While we cannot agree with his views contradicting the universality of the Church or her dogmas regarding marriage, it is obvious that he highly valued English-ness, which is not surprising, given that the same year he became an Anglo-Catholic he became a British subject. He was attached, however, to the “Anglo-Catholic movement within the Church of England”¹⁶ that shared his commitment to the 2,000-year tradition of Catholicism and “combined the scholarship… of the Oxford fathers (such as John Henry Newman) about the Catholic origins of the Church of England with a recovery of its pre-Reformation worship and spiritual life… emphasiz[ing] sacramentalism, centered on the Eucharist and penance.”¹⁷ Eliot was, in sum, a member of the Church of England, but avowedly an Anglo-Catholic. Whether or not the position can be upheld theologically or even logically, his earlier understanding he would be likely to “adhere to the Catholic Church,” was fulfilled, in his view, in the “Anglo-Catholic” sect of the Church of England:

I prefer to think of the Church as what I believe it is more and more coming to be, not the “English Church,” but national as “the Catholic Church in England” … I believe … the Church of England is strengthening its position as a branch of the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church in England.¹⁸

Whatever we might say about such a view of Catholicism, Eliot’s faith was certainly not Unitarian and absolutely not Protestant. He considered humanism, which he attacked strongly and frequently, as “‘a product—a by-product—of Protestant theology in its last agonies’” and considered any Protestant a member of a “sect,” who “is negative and does not have the support of the visible Church with its continuity and inclusiveness.”¹⁹ We can pray that his commitment to the centrality of the Incarnation and its sacramental manifestation are acceptable to God; we can say with certainty they had an immediate and profound impact on his poetry; they “fructified” in the life of his art.

At the time of his conversion Eliot was experiencing writer’s block. He reflected in 1953 “I thought my poetry was over after ‘The Hollow Men’ [1925] … writing the Ariel poems [1927] released the stream and led directly to ‘Ash Wednesday’ [1930].”²⁰ If nothing else, then, one effect of Eliot’s conversion on his poetry was its revitalization, and not just materially. Even the figure he used to describe the experience suggests living water released and welling up, overcoming the dryness of a waste land with a stream, which figures in the first post-conversion poem. Among the Ariel poems is “Journey of the Magi,” an explicitly religious, but still very modern poem that serves well to demonstrate the nature of the change in Eliot’s post-conversion poetry. The poem presents, as Spurr rightly puts it, “the most banal of poetic representations of the nativity scene ever”:²¹ “And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon/ Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.” This is the conversion story retold as it might happen today, the characters and plot are familiar historical figures; the response of the Magi is striking, but real. Eliot uses the same technique in his first play Murder in the Cathedral about St. Thomas of Canterbury, illustrating the consistent, insistent message of the later poems and plays to modern readers: the Truth remains the same, but our “approach to the meaning,” should we ever approach the “Word without a word” (“Ash Wednesday”) in our “twittering world”(“Burnt Norton”), will “[restore] the experience/ In a different form, beyond any meaning/ We can assign to happiness” (“The Dry Salvages”). The Faith is real and unchanged, but our world is one without faith, so valid, true modern art of faith must reflect that, or it simply is not telling the truth about the world, regardless of what it says about God. The Magi express no emotional joy at all in the Epiphany but they certainly do convert, reflecting “[t]his was a long time ago, I remember, /And I would do it again.” Their quest is not, as Spurr suggests of this and all of Eliot’s later poetry, “incomplete”; they are not left “unfulfilled,” they just aren’t particularly emotionally or sentimentally happy about what they have learned, which is that in the Incarnation, the birth is really about death:

     . . . set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

This is precisely the essence of Thomas’s Christmas day sermon in Murder in the Cathedral: “at this same time of all the year that we celebrate at once the Birth of Our Lord and His Passion and Death upon the Cross”; but here Thomas goes on to reflect further on the mystery saying “Beloved, as the World sees, this is to behave in a strange fashion.” He finishes reminding us of Christ’s explanation that the peace He gives, much like the joy, is not the peace, joy, or even the certainty or fulfillment that the world gives. This is the recurrent theme of the post-conversion poetry: time is only redeemed, resolved, given meaning by eternity; the only way to get from time to eternity is death; and the only way for death to “fructify in the lives of others” is through the Incarnation, the action in time when God became man to die that man might live in eternal bliss. All the journeying of the modern pilgrim, chronicled from “Prufrock” on, can never end well if we don’t recognize, with the Magi, that the “Death by Water” presented vaguely in The Waste Land is, in fact, the re-birth of baptism. The hope—slim at best—that the earlier poems suggest is confirmed in the post-conversion poetry over and over again as it presents, in different ways the action of eternity in time and our effort to hold on to our awareness, our “apprehension” of that interaction, “[t]he point of intersection of the timeless/ With time” that is

An occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

Since most of us aren’t saints, we have to settle for “hints and guesses” and “unattended… moment[s] in and out of time,” which become the substance of the recurrent message of Eliot’s post-conversion poetic effort… “You say I am repeating/ Something I have said before. I shall say it again./ Shall I say it again?” …yes.

Another significant effect of Eliot’s conversion is his transition from mere poetry, if you will, to verse drama. Four Quartets, Eliot’s last major poem, was not “the end of his creative journey”²² as Spurr and others contend, but a beginning, to cite the poem itself—in the passage used here as an epigraph—because after Four Quartets the poetry became “incarnate” on the stage in order to reach more directly a broader audience. Eliot became very interested in the idea of a Christian society—he wrote a treatise with this title—and his transition to theater where his poetry is experienced or witnessed communally reflects a Catholic appreciation for sacred liturgy, when the faithful gather to witness the drama enacted in the holy sacrifice of the Mass.

The poetry itself, its form, its sound, its difficulty remains very much the same. This is an interesting parallel to Eliot’s faith journey in its continuity, but also provides a final reflection upon the nature of art and the artist, and the action of grace on human nature. In speaking specifically about the development of “Ash Wednesday,” Eliot captures the idea of all his poetry’s continuity: “out of separate poems… gradually I came to see it as a sequence. That’s one way in which my mind does seem to have worked through the years poetically—doing things separately and then seeing the possibility of fusing them together, altering them, and making a kind of whole of them.”²³ In “The Dry Salvages” he says “It seems, as one becomes older,/ That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—/Or even development…” When Eliot was asked about the effect of his conversion on his poetry he remarked that in that regard he was “absolutely unconverted.”²⁴ Eliot became a believer but remained a poet, a truth-teller, purifying the dialect of the tribe, the modern tribe in the modern world with modern language and thought and agnosticism:

[T]he representation of the typical world in which modern men and women abide and from which they must strive to separate themselves remains that of the wasteland . . . Eliot’s new vision and explanation of the creation of man in the image of God and of his potential for redemption did not turn him away from evoking, in disturbing poetry, the debauched reality of the lives of twentieth-century human beings.²⁵

And this makes perfect sense. To tell the truth about God doesn’t necessitate lying about the world, and a great poet cannot lie about reality without failing as an artist whose job is to “[describe] truthfully what he sees from where he is”; he “cannot move or mold reality in the interests of abstract truth”²⁶ without giving into sentimentality, and “by nature, Eliot is incapable of sentimentality of any kind.”²⁷ His poetry “converts” in the same way the Magi convert: profoundly but, by all appearances, so subtly it may seem not at all. He returns to his place in poetry, “no longer at ease” amongst the “alien people” of modernist aesthetics, but laboring to awaken in them a vision of the eternal. In Flannery O’Connor’s discussion of the Catholic writer she describes exactly what we see in Eliot’s later work and the big lesson for us about art in a faithless world. In order for it to have the slightest chance of awakening the sense of the immaterial, divine dimension, it must at least be believable on the material, temporal level or it will be dismissed out of hand:

A dimension taken away is one thing; a dimension added is another, and what the Catholic writer and reader will have to remember is that the reality of the added dimension will be judged in a work of fiction by the truthfulness and wholeness of the literal level of the natural events presented.²⁸

Who is going to take seriously the idea of the unseen Truth, if the poet can’t even accurately reflect what we can see? The truth about good art is that it can awaken a soul to divine reality, manifesting the work of grace according to the Catholic doctrine of justification as slow, gentle healing. An adult after conversion, or the host after the consecration, is profoundly—infinitely—different, but his or her (or His) appearance or “accidents” remain the same. A soul, upon conversion, is not turned into something else or covered in a blanket of snow—quickly melted in the wasteland. There is no diminution or loss of personality or even artistic capacity, as some would claim and did claim about Eliot, because of his or her submission to Truth; there is, rather, a

          …concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy…

Grace works effectively but imperceptibly, perfecting the soul; this is reflected or shown forth in Eliot’s conversion and in the poetry that flows from it.

Endnotes

¹ Peter Ackroyd, T.S. Eliot: A Life (Simon and Schuster, 1984), p. 16.

² Ackroyd, p. 17.

³ Ackroyd, p. 162.

⁴ Eliot, “Thoughts after Lambeth.”

⁵ Ackroyd, 138.

⁶ Barry Spurr, “Anglo-Catholicism and the ‘Religious Turn’ in Eliot’s Poetry.” Religion & Literature, Vol. 44, No. 1 (2012), p. 137.

⁷ Kenneth Asher, T.S. Eliot and Ideology (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 9.

⁸ William Turner Levy, “The Idea of the Church in T.S. Eliot,” The Christian Scholar, Vol. 41, No. 4 (1958), p. 587.

⁹ Ackroyd, 155.

¹⁰ Asher, 53.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ackroyd, 159.

¹³ Levy, 589.

¹⁴ Eliot, “Thoughts after Lambeth.”

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ackroyd, 160.

¹⁷ Spurr, 137-38.

¹⁸ Eliot, “Thoughts after Lambeth.”

¹⁹ Levy, 596.

²⁰ B.C Southam, A Student’s Guide to the Poems of T.S. Eliot (Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 179.

²¹ Spurr, 141.

²² Spurr, 140.

²³ Ackroyd, 176.

²⁴ Ackroyd, 163.

²⁵ Spurr, 142.

²⁶ Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (The Noonday Press, 1957), 150.

²⁷ Levy, 598.

²⁸ O’Connor, 150.

Image Sources

TITLE IMAGE: Sand Dunes, Wastelands, Henry Golden Dearth (1864–1919).