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

However, further clarification is needed. Deep faith includes the processing of doubt. Paul Tillich states:

“...there is a doubt that is an unavoidable implication of sin, both being expressions of the state of estrangement. But the problem is not that of doubt as a consequence of sin; the problem is that of doubt as an element of faith.

.. .The infinite distance between God and man is never bridged; it is identical with man’s finitude. Therefore creative courage is an element of faith even in the state of perfection, and where there is courage, there is risk and the doubt implied in risk. Faith would not be faith but mystical union were it deprived of the element of doubt within in.”4

Said in another way: faith is not simple, but complex. Faith rises beyond doubt, but does so by contemplating the nagging questions. Faith partly conquers them, but also always lives with them. This is part of our pilgrim’s progress in sanctification. We find doubt in Moses, the Psalms, Isaiah, Jesus, Paul, Augustine - and to jump many centuries — also in Eliot.

So we can say that while those who do not like Christian doctrine have been repelled by the converted E\iot, those who do not like doubt are repelled by the searching Eliot. Before and after his conversion, Eliot was a great questioner. For this reason, Eliot continues to speak to the twenty-first century. He indeed speaks of the need to wait for faith, and moves back and forth between faith’s search for understanding, and understanding’s search for faith:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.5

Eliot’s devotion always swung between the ultimate (questions) and the penultimate or proximate answers. He went deeply into the history of literature, philosophy and religion, including Eastern expressions. Belief, the need for conversion, the falling back into sin, the dark cast of mind, the glimmer of mystical hope - all of these were combined by Eliot into interpretations of experiences (empirical and ideal). By walking with deep thoughts he hoped to be pilgrimaging forward. Eliot was aware that literary folk like Robert Graves, Ezra Pound, and Irving Babbitt, were into Eastern religion, and he himself alludes to this kind of thought in many places, from lines in The Wasteland to lines in Four Quartets. He makes use especially of the eastern denial of desire, but does not wholly convert to this. Eliot had read William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, and approached the leap of faith cautiously, indeed very hesitantly, and for that reason is a perennial partner in contemporary dialogue. He escorted many ideas from all the major worldviews and ideologies, but confessed in Four Quartets: “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” And so it was that as a Christian he said in his own way, “...that moment in time gave the meaning” (Chorus 7 from The Rock).

Christ, church &.world in t.s. uliot’s 1934 CHORUSES from n

4 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Digswell Place: Nisbet, 1968), Vol.III, 254.

5 T.S. Eliot, East Coker, lines 124-7, in Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 1944; reprint 1989), 24.

2013/1-2 Sárospataki Füzetek 67