Sárospataki Füzetek 17. (2013)

2013 / 1-2. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Sawyer, Frank: Krisztus, egyház és világ T. S. Eliot Kórusok "A sziklá"-ból, 1934 c. versében

Sawyer Frank

All this creates a labyrinth for many who first pick up his works. But he does this in part to echo the fragmentation of what since has been called the postmodern plight.

As for his basic concern, in The Waste Land (1925) and in The Hollow Men (1925) he presents the problem of a secularized loss of transcendent meaning. Then he gives an answer to this problem by speaking of turning points, as in Journey of the Magi (1927) and in Ash Wednesday (1930). Eliot reaches a kind of harmony in Four Quartets, which attempt to reconcile the temporal and the eternal. A number of basic themes are found throughout his works. These include: meaning and meaninglessness; the desert wasteland of the soul; complacency; a spiritual pilgrimage; time and eternity; words and the Word of God; estrangement and the search for peace and harmony. While all these are present in his works, they appear in different contexts and with different expressions, partly the same and partly adding new aspects.

Eliot seeks mystic moments of the immediate experience of the eternal, which however weakly, refracts its light upon all moments of time. He concludes The Dry Salvages by saying that all we have are “hints and guesses”, but these need to be integrated into “prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action”. The hint is the gift of insight into Incarnation, which is “the impossible union/Of spheres of existence”.2 In this mystical insight the pain, limitations, sins and failures of daily existence are overcome and redeemed. This may partly happen in the Hegelian style of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, but it especially needs something like the Kierkegaardian ‘moment’ to redeem the moments of time. Already in The Rock we find the expression, “that moment of time gave the meaning” (50).

1.2 Dogma & doubt: the converted Eliot

Many literary contemporaries of Eliot were not interested in following him along the path of his conversion — which was specifically to the Anglican church (1927). He had worded so well the mind-set and searching of a generation in response to the First World War, a generation which looked into the mirror of its own alienation and could only see nihilistic-narcistic choices. But many could not follow him when he spoke of his new orientation, nor could everyone share Eliots concern about the disappearance of a Christian society.

Yet there is a typical Eliot-style irony in all of this: he continued to speak of both dogma and doubt. As one analyst says,

[Eliot presents] “...the absence, not exactly of faith, but of the God in Whom faith would believe — if only we had faith. ...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.”3

2 T.S.Eliot, Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 38. For more on this, see Peter Revell, Quest in Modern American Poetry (New Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1981), ch.4, ‘Spirit unappeased: T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets', 137-170.

3 J.Bottum, ‘What T.S. Eliot Almost Believed’, in First Things 55 (Aug./Sept.l995) 25-30.

66 S ÁROS PATAKI FÜZETEK 2013/1-2