Sárospataki Füzetek 12. (2008)
2008 / 2. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Frank Sawyer: A reading of T. S. Eliot's Ashwednesday
Frank Sawyer Part five If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent If the unheard, unspoken Word is unspoken, unheard; Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard, The Word without a word, the Word within The world and for the world; And the light shone in darkness and Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled About the centre of the silent Word. Section five begins with a theology of the word. The references include the Gospel of John chapter one which speaks of the ‘logos’ which shines in the darkness. John 1:10 is a difficult verse to translate and the meaning can be that the world did not understand the word, but also that the world did not conquer the divine word. In any case, the poet finds this expressed by the idea that ‘the world still whirled’ against God, who as Creator set the world in motion. The whirling of the world against the divine word is also part of the ‘turning’ which is a central theme in this poem. There is a cosmological meaning (God as sovereign over the whirling planets) and a redemptive meaning (God who reveals love through Christ, the Word). We must consider that even though this poem deals with the journey of the soul toward union with God, for Eliot there is a cultural meaning also. He later wrote in an essay on how he views culture: If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again.... To our Christian heritage we owe many things beside religious faith. Through it we trace the evolution of our arts, through it we have our conception of Roman Law which has done so much to shape the Western World, through it we have our conceptions of private and public morality.26 As, since the time of Eliot, western culture has indeed become more and more postchristian and highly pluralist, the relevance of this view he holds forth may be estimated more accurately as time passes. He could also say in the same essay that, “Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith.” Things would change so drastically, he thought, that Europe would also become quite different. Returning to the poem, the ‘Word’ (capitalized as a reference to Christ, the ‘logos’ in John’s Gospel) communicates that God is ‘for the world’. ‘For the world’ was an element used by theologians who were contemporary 26 Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, reprinted extract in Selected Prose of T.S.Eliot, ed. Frank Kerode (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988), 304. 78
