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

system focus on bread and beer, wine, coffee and sausage, and thereby parody the Church’s bread and wine of the Eucharist.

Ill 7- Seventh chorus — Christ brought light to human history

In the beginning God created the world. Waste and

void. Waste and void. And darkness was upon the face of the deep.

[Blindly men were...]

Worshipping snakes or trees, worshipping devils rather

than nothing: crying for life beyond life, for ecstasy not of the flesh.

Then came...

A moment in time but time was made through that

moment: for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning.

Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep.

Has the Church failed mankind, or has mankind failed the Church?

When the Church is no longer regarded, not even opposed, and men have forgotten

All gods except Usury, Lust and Power.

[51]

Part two of the pageant begins here. The new gods are reason, money, power, comfortable life, race, and consumerism. To avoid these we need to “Remember, living in time, you must live also now in Eternity” (52). The task of a saint is to “...apprehend/the point of intersection of the timeless/with time” {The Dry Salvages) - and here in Chorus VII the wheel of action at the beginning of the pageant is contrasted with the point of stillness, or in Aristotelian terms, the ‘unmoved mover’. But Eliot seeks a synthesis of eternity and time, since we “...must serve as spirit and body” (76). Thus,

“It is not one of the motives of The Rock to suggest to the audience a negative way of sanctity through contemplation or martyrdom. ... The Rock contains, in other words, a philosophy of using time rather than of escaping from it... [and] the Incarnation...has redeemed all the moments of time that meet and become eternal in it....”11

The “negative way of sanctity” is found in Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, which is a mar11 Grover Smith, T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meanings (Chicago University Press, 1950).

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