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 enlightened by, the Memoria Sancta. The divine revelation of love changes our love, expanding it beyond mere desire. This, he restates, is liberating. Everything becomes “renewed, transfigured, in another pattern” (165). The basis for understanding these thoughts in Little Gidding are found clearly in The Rock, as well as numerous other places throughout Eliot’s poetry. Perhaps especially in Ash-Wednesday, where the turning (conversion) is always a returning — to God and to our experience of life with the Memoria Sancta of the Incarnation as a liberating foothold. ‘Light’ in Eliot’s perspective is very Christocentric, even when prismatically experienced, as it should be. The idea of Christ as the light is found, among many other places, in John 1: “The true light...was coming into the world”. Or, for example, in the Nicene Creed: ‘Light of Light’. IV. 7. Christ saves us from ideologies and moral evils There is much about morality in this church pageant, and the relatively recently converted (1927) Eliot could explore some lines here on faith as a moral dynamic — not only for people, but for society. Eliot perceives that ideologies easily become idolatries. The snake passage near the end of the play is a kind of up-date on the serpent in the Garden of Eden, just as the second half of the play starting at Chorus VII, revisits the meaning of the creation. The author is careful to make morality wide ranging, by mentioning a list of deadly sins (57) as we saw in regard to the passage on the Crusades. At other times, sins are lined up as “gods... [of] Usury, Lust, Power” (51). He recognizes that some moral missteps are grievous and deadly, while others seem merely trivial: “And no man knows or cares who is his neighbour” (21), but this is a step towards “Am I my brother’s keeper?”, and ever since Cain this has been used to justify the grievous missteps, also. That is why the poet asks, “Do Lion’s no longer need keepers?” (42), meaning: has the world become innocent? Has the time of the harmony of the lion and the calf, the wolf and the lamb, arrived (Isaiah 11:6)? It is Eliot’s view that Christ turns our focus toward the good (divine light), and without this we focus so strongly on things, ideas, achievements in life, that we are very much in danger of using immoral means to reach our idolatrized ideologies. We “prize the serpent’s golden/eyes” and are hypnotized by the power of evil. By way of contrast, we should turn to the divine light and be satisfied if we “have light/ Enough to take your step and find your foothold” (84). IV. 8. Christ the giver of meaning All of what we have been saying places Christ at the centre. Eliot states in Chorus VII his cryptic summary of the Incarnation and its importance for our lives: Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep. Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time and of time, A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history... A moment in time but time was made through that moment: for without the meaning there is no time, Sáros pat Füzetek 20
