T.S. ELIOT'S FOUR QUARTETS: A PATTERN FOR CHRISTIAN LIVING

it's lovely to be here with I see so many friends from the power of the word conferences which I have been involved in with Francesca Knox from the beginning and it's and I always say I've all have actually been very hesitant to go to any academic conference the only one I will always go to is the power of the word because I feel like I'm that this is a confluence of religion and and poetry which is just a very to me it's one most strongest connections one could possibly have because I always say that Scripture is simply Scripture is poetry and poetry is living scripture that the inspiration keeps coming in poets and that's the great thing about it prophetic word which is going to be our next conference which I hope you'll all come to an Oxford 2017 Michael thank you for that introduction I appreciate it and you mentioned just happened to see the back of some newspapers those come in here it said Christopher Hitchens toward the end of his life turned toward religion something like that I only saw the headline but I had debated him about sick about a year before he died I was invited to debate Hitchens and that's the Pennsylvania Book Festival and I don't know why I agreed on the existence of God and so they called me and they said you know you'll be for God he'll be against God and and I thought it wasn't just somehow an irresistible invitation and and I got there in their end their word you can look it up on Google there were two thousand people in the audience and they turned away three thousand wanting to get into it and they had some moderator who was a Pennsylvania Supreme Court judge who was going to be the somehow the referee between us and I I realized as I got on the stage what a terrible mistake I've made you know I never debated I mean in fact as I drove into this Pennsylvania town there was a billboard I swear to god it said the great debate is there a god Hitchens versus / it needing I thought I'm so ruined you know I've never apart from my wife I've never debated anyone and I thought you know and I said to the Hitchens we're standing backstage I'd never met him before I said have you ever done this debate he said actually I did just last week I debated the same subject I debated Tony Blair in Toronto I said what am i into here and so what are you doing these situations you know of course I happen to believe in God I'm a Christian and I've never made any bones about it I say it over and over again and I've said it in print a million times so yet it's another thing to actually stand on the stage and and go back and forth with somebody as clever as Hitchens you know he's very good so uh yeah I'm sure I was killed and debate I didn't care I mean the things if you don't care you're very free you know I'm saying you know and so I was able actually to use that as my opening ploy I said mr. Hitchens has debated this subject a million times and I said this is the first time and probably the last time I'll ever debate anyone said what a mistake to choose this guide of debate but though just the one little point that I think that uh where I did score one good point or whatever a point I said that I thought that atheists like you mr. Hitchens atheists like this man and extreme fundamentalist and we all know who they are are essentially two sides of the same coin and Hitchin said what do you mean you're just a fundamentalist Christopher I said you've believed and I said you guys have this narrow band of reality where everything is either black or white and I said to have an absolute view of either way thinking about God is simply fundamentalism literalism and I said you know what I'm my interest in Christianity is that we're interested in Christ as a mythic pattern and Methos in the sense of the story that is true story which has contours which can actually inform us and shape our lives and for me that's where could the heart of Christianity lies in the life of Jesus and and and how he teaches us not only to live but how to die I mean there's the ARS moriendi the moriendi they are dying is you know we're all heading there and some of us are closer than others best we don't know but nevertheless is all short spell anyway so it's T Christ teaches us how to live how to die but also mainly I think what am i interested me is in how to live how to behave where in the life of Christ can we find Inklings augments Omens moments that are going to help us to get through the day to behave with other people in community to create a society that might be just if we can think of what that might mean and and and have times of inspiration and hope to me that's the essence of Christianity and practice and so it brings me to the topic of my talk tonight the TS Eliot's Four Quartets as a pattern for Christian living when I told again my wife that I was this was the title of my talk she's burst into laughter she said that sounds like something that you know a talk someone might have given in 1920 or past probably 1897 I mean I've spent plenty of time at MLA conferences modern and and a cadet I've been believe me my share of them in my life I've even written my share of these tedious papers and too many of them for one lifetime you know I know the kind of how most of my colleagues in the field would think you know this is an absurdity to give a talk on TS Eliot's Four Quartets as a pattern for Christian living that's not what you're meant to talk about in literary criticism literary criticism is is about you know certainly once the new criticism came along you stopped even thinking remotely about the purpose of literature you just basically I a Richard just wanted us to you know Sharon look at the poem on the page not even know when it was written or who was written for or think about what purpose it might serve in life it's just something that you analyze for his ironies and paradoxes and so forth and so on you know certainly once you get into post structuralism you know the this kind of a paper would be absolutely inexplicable on every level wouldn't it Angela inexplicable on every imaginable level that you could give it think think that I'm gonna read TS Eliot's Four Quartets as a pattern for Christian living but nevertheless I think with dr. Johnson that the purpose of literature is to help us to live our lives or possibly help possibly to live our lives in a better way and I have always used for quartets over fifty years of reading it as bedtime reading and has something to say I believe it can teach me something about how to live my life especially my spiritual life I think it's important for that so that's how I'm gonna go for this today so I'm after sixties glasses on there they amazing magic trick I found them it's amazing what you can find what you can find online imagine a king glasses there we go people keep saying me oh you've broken your glasses no no no they're meant to be like that okay so um well in his and in the famous essay by matthew arnold 1864 the function of criticism at the present time you see where elliott got his titled for his essays from arnold said it's because because criticism has so little tempt in the pure intellectual sphere has so detached itself from practice has been so directly polemical and controversial that it has so ill accomplished in this country it's best spiritual work interesting that Arnold said that Arnold was pointing here in a direction that a few critics today would even take seriously that there is such a thing as a spiritual work of criticism that's what I'm hoping to do today the spiritual work of criticism which depends of course on the spiritual work of poetry itself whatever that could be anyone can see of course that poetry has basically lost its audience in our time the number of serious readers has as all poets know and to latent will confirm this dwindled shall we say well at the same time the yearning for spiritual nourishment for what wallace stevens when my favorite poets called the bread of faithful speech has only increased i see endless books that offer some sort of spiritual guidance just going to into a Barnes and Noble or water stones and you'll see the whole shelf of them there and in fact if you look to see what poets are best-selling poets now in America they're really on in any bookstore any airport if there are books of poetry there are only two poets that I'll be there maybe three but two would be Rumi right the Sufi mystic poet who is in fact I was reading this an article about this in Time magazine by far the best-selling poet of the last thirty years in America rumi or there's a poet Maya she and I have the same editor at the same press Mary Oliver I felt rather horrible when I just met my editor in Boston for the first time she's published my collected poems came about a month ago she said well you're the only the only other poet I do I do Mary Oliver and just to tell you her last book of poems sold 70,000 copies 70,000 copies for a book of poems she is an and she is really having a piss an Episcopalian Anglican poet and it is spiritual nature in nature in God is what her poetry is about but it's interesting how these are the two most popular poets in America and I think this is partly because something in Rumi and Mary Oliver has to do with spirituality the work of these poets confronts readers with questions of time and mortality and the use of nature as a spiritual resource and the wish for large answers to questions I mean an illness they're going back to Emerson in America nature 1836 where he's asking large questions and things he says nature is a symbol of the Spirit all natural facts in life are signs of spiritual facts and so that is really especially an American thing nature and the spirit go very closely together I've been teaching this quarter for many years at Middlebury College where I've been personal since 82 and on poetry and spirituality and I'm amazed by how desperate students are for spiritual guidance of some kind they're looking they're not looking for just for answers they're looking for some questions and I mean they're looking for the feeling there and I'm not a question of answers they want to know what are the questions I'm they always begin my class by going around the room and I say please tell me something of your religious orientation they'll extort 'old and and one by one by one they always say and this most common thing they say I'm spiritual but not religious right you've heard that a million times I'm spiritual but not religious what does that mean to be spiritual I means their yearning there it means you're miserable you're miserable and you wonder why are you miserable and are there any ways that you can help me and not being miserable so actually say now we're going to begin this class in a way you'll never begin any other class while you're at university we're going to pray for three minutes startled startled and they offer a prayer and we do think it's this totally secular University campus and I've had so many students over the years say that was my best time ever at Middlebury was when you began classes with a prayer giveme they couldn't have never heard of such a thing but you know I think it was a terrific transition into our discussion of the class begins we read the Book of Psalms and then we read Rumi and we read the Dao de Jing and we read we read John Donne and George Herbert and move our way through Hopkins TS Eliot and we end with Mary Oliver so that's it seems appropriate begin with at least a meditation if not a prayer to get to readjust the sensibility in the mind and start to focus in that way so I just do that so uhm what I hope today to suggest is that poetry can offer spiritual direction and that one can certainly find a good deal of spiritual direction as a Christian reader in the poems of Elliot needless to say some of Elliot's friends were dubious when he joined the Anglican Church in 1927 Virginia Woolf on hearing of his conversion predicted he would quote soon drop his Christianity with his wife as one might empty the fish bones after the herring it's awfully mean of her really bad naughty Virginia Woolf of course Elliott only recently published The Waste Land which many regarded as the ultimate expression of post-war nihilism the governing emotion the poem being fear and a handful of dust all the old symbols Eliot seemed to be suggesting were reduced to a heap of broken images it seemed that few green branches would grow out of the stony rubbish of the post Christian civilization that Elliot was writing about in the wake of such destruction as represented by the war but something stirred in Eliot I once had a conversation with well what am I actually first the first year I was teaching I was 25 or 6 years old at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and the first poet they said oh we have an ancient English poet coming to lecture I a Richards and we'd like you to walk him around the campus and did before and then introduce him so I went and picked him up at the Hanover in in Hanover New Hampshire and it would took him around he was about 95 years old my said Oh mr. Richard Gees I said him I'm I've been assigned to walk you around he said oh I was once he said I was once a young Don at Cambridge 1912 and I was asked to take Henry James around the campus and I never said to him do what sir proposed you like you like Hopkins he said oh those matches don't strike on my box never heard that before and he said all these Christian poets I don't get it he said I was a good friend of Tom Eliot and he said never forget Tom came up to Cambridge about 1924-25 and I went to bring him a cup of tea in his room and he wasn't in the room there was a Sunday morning and I wondered where the hell is he gone and he came back and he said oh I've been to Chapel I thought what the hell were you doing in Chapel they said that was the first sign that things were going downhill I was quite an amazing conversation as a young man I had with Richards of course Elliot would certainly commit to Christianity in a big time and and he remained a committed Christian until his death in 65 I suggested his faith was a complex affair mingling aspects of Eastern religion especially Hinduism and Buddhism which he had studied very carefully at Harvard even a SAN script with a deep sense of the Christian traditions plural of spirituality of course his own rather Stern demeanor at least in public had its roots in his family's connections to Boston Unitarianism which had largely abandoned its Calvinist origins except for the belief in good works I've always disliked Unitarians I shouldn't say this but I once I remember as a young man I went to a special Unitarian Chapel in Boston and they sang a my treat a mighty fortress is our mind I said you know who dear I left I left quietly by the back door well the life of prayer and spiritual discipline were however what appealed to Eliot unitarianism probably struck him as rather thin gruel with rectitude having to stand in for genuine spiritual growth during his year in Paris 1910-11 he attended lectures of course by offering a barrack song on the philosophy of time and one sees that influence in the great four quartets Eliot sometimes attended masses at la madeleine that glorious neoclassical temple to christianity the drama of the liturgy appealed immensely to Eliot and I would guess that his origins in the origins of his Anglo Catholicism probably lie in his attendance at those masses at la Madeleine Eliot's work in the 30s I'm thinking here of Ash Wednesday and murder in a Cathedral his great play certainly reflect his commitment as a writer to the Christian faith not that I don't use the word conversion here with Elliot as I don't think he would have really liked that term the notion of a conversion of the Pauline variety would have seen to him as an American southerner as way too flamboyant and even false I think it would have not been pleasant to him no road to Damascus 40s Elliot rather he pursued a quiet faith that required discipline a careful tilling of the fields intellect and emotion for him fused as he explored the gradually realizing kingdom of God and there's probably no better record of this than the Four Quartets which unfolded over a period of eight years from burnt Norton which was written and published 1935 no doubt he saw that this poem offered a frame on which he could weave a sequence and he did with East Coker the second one begun in 1937 published three years later in 1940 at the beginning of the war the third quartet seems have come rather more quickly published in 1941 a very bleak year after all if there ever was one in British history with London under constant siege and one feels that that pressure in this great quartet the third one the dry saw of ages with his Eve occasion of quotas quote the voices wailing and of the withered of withering of withered flowers Eliot invites his readers to quote repeat a prayer on behalf of women who have quote seen their sons or husbands setting forth and not returning in such desperate times as the war Eliot sees that those around him eagerly look for ways to control time to anticipate the future if that's possible and perhaps to look for hope or reassurance where ever you could find it so people threw themself as Elliot noticed on rather foolish practices ways of controlling the future you know we're trying to read palms or draw cards from a pack random hoping for a sign they turned to drugs or to psychotherapy I say that as the husband of a psychotherapist so I feel very careful I don't dare repeat a dream and when I wake up to scary I'm gonna get all sorts of answers coming out of things coming at me in the latter though in psychotherapy people explore Eliot writes the womb or tomb or dreams in every instance these people are trying to discern a pattern that will help them to explain the meaning of their lives to think about its direction this activity he notes gets especially frenzied in times of war in times of quote distress of Nations I love that phrase such understatement this search for meaning goes on in a kind of panicky mode but it's all quite quite pointless Eliot says then come for me what are the most formidable important eloquent and genuinely useful lines in the whole of the Four Quartets I'll read them is about ten lines I read them over and over and over again but to apprehend the point of the intersection of the timeless with time is an occupation for the saint no occupation either but something given and taken in a lifetimes death and love ardor and selflessness and self surrender for most of us there is only the unattended moment the moment in and out of time the distraction fit lost in a shaft of sunlight the wild time unseen or the winter lightning or the waterfall or music heard so deeply it's not hurt at all but you are the music while the music lasts there are only hints and guesses hints followed by guesses and the rest is prayer observance discipline thought and action the hint half guessed the gif half understood is incarnation that's about as good as poetry gets right there there you got it since Homer that's the best bit you're gonna get these lines are for me a kind of program for Christian living they lay out a pattern that is immensely productive any literary critic will scoff at my saying this but this is what I'm doing now not really literary criticism I'm actually going to use these lines as a spiritual guide as a form of spiritual spiritual direction from someone Eliot who managed in his own life to deepen and complicate his faith at the same time rather than intriguing notion emotion for him sure I got the right page s intriguing notion emotion for him fused as he explored that gradually I know what I've done wrong here I haven't haven't turned the page didn't make sense an intriguing notion there we go as many Christians seem to prefer to simplify their faith to draw hard lines around matters of dogma to close down rather than open possibilities Eliot allows that there are these Saints among us who spend quote a lifetime's death in love trying to discern the point of intersection of the timeless and time what does that mean I suspect it it means for Eliot's salvation is really the apprehension of times solubility he had learned from Unruh Bergson about time as der a this notion came from Bergson's doctoral thesis where he drew a distinction between the real experience of time in ordinary life he called this real duration joy Wow and the rigidly spatial clock time that we overlay in an attempt to on a graph line Eliot thought of the latter as a misguided attempt to impose spatial concepts on what was in reality and experience time itself said Bergson comes to us in the form of discrete moments the measurement of time itself becomes an Lu Bergson wrote we give a mechanical explanation of a fact and then substitute the explanation for the fact itself so Eliot combines the Beck Sounion idea with the well-known Hindu idea of time as a non-linear reality in hinduism as in Christianity God is timeless he is the quote Stillpoint of the turning wheel he is now always time as clock time daily time is simply a manifestation of God that collapses into the black hole of the absolute one thinks of Wordsworth in his notion of spots of time here's that famous passage from book 12 of the prelude there are in our existence spots of time that with distinct preeminence retain a renovating virtue whence depressed by false opinion and contentious thought or aught of heavier or more deadly weight in trivial occupations and the round of ordinary intercourse our minds are nourished and invisibly repaired such moments are scattered everywhere taking their date from our first childhood a beautiful passage about spots of time and now we again moments in and out of time that we sometimes encounter these are moments such as Elliot refers to frequently the Four Quartets as in burnt Norton dying past and time future allow but a little consciousness to be conscious is not to be in time but only in time can wonderful now catalogue of the moments can the moment in the Rose Garden the moment in the arbor with a rain beat the moment in the drafty church at smoke fall be remembered involved with past and future only through time time is conquered so we have two kinds of time but it's so difficult to comprehend them or to integrate them but one needs clock time to get eternal time to conquer it we've all experienced these moments of real the or I'd say platonic reality with a big are they come to us at unattended moments so fleeting that we almost can't believe in their importance almost can't believe they happen if they do the spots of time might be strung together over a lifetime but it's only those rare people who managed to focus as many Christians seem to prefer to simplify their face to draw oh sorry gotta keep turning pages but it's only those rare people who manage to focus on these spots of time to break through linear time in a sustained way Eliot calls them the Saints and you think there must have been the nuns in this convent for years and years and years whose whole life was devoted to somehow integrated in those spots of time so he calls them the Saints and one can imagine nuns or brothers in their quiet cells saying so through decades of prayer and contemplation managed to access God or the absolute the Mystics probably do this the great Rumi the 13th century Sufi poet wrote again and again about time and eternity as in this ode which I'm going to quote which I have reframed myself in a kind of a poem of my own working from a very literal translation from the Persian here's the poem death is our altar where we tie the knot with all with everything with God's own flame that's the biggest secret God is one his beam shines through the windows and divides in hard bright colors shimmering the house God's there in that blue bowl of grapes in juice that comes from each pale globe in wine that fills and flames us as we flush this light that pours through everything around us but we only see the flickering the sparks from sunlight in the Sun a holy bond this hot white flame that burns down days God's in the fire light so we spread our wings fly toward the self-same the consuming burn well la Elliot understood only too well that most of us himself included don't have the persistence of the saint or the Mystics wild thirst for the absolute instead there is quote only the unattended moment a moment in and out of time but there are also experiences of timelessness as when quote the music is heard so deeply that it's not hurt at all but you are the music or the music lasts these are moments of absorption where eternal time seizes us half by chance and takes us for a little dance I suspect most of us will really know what Eliot's talking about here we've all had these experiences these moments are spots of time he calls hints and guesses and that's about as far as Eliot will go he's not willing to offer certainty certainty saying here is God the absolutes not served up on a platter fundamentalism with its iron certainties held no appeal for Eliot and he would have recognized that this recent movement within Christianity cut against the grain of religious practice as it had devolved over two millennia incidentally the term fundamentalist only goes back to 1920 when a Baptist layman came up with the term alluding to a series a very literal-minded pamphlets called the fundamentals that had been published just a few years before after the quote hints and guesses come with Eliot modestly calls the rest and what I would consider the five key points of Christian practice so beautifully framed the rest is prayer observance discipline thought and action the hand half guessed the gift haft understood is incarnation this is almost to dizzyingly good let me work through these five points and regard them as this pattern for Christian living what we can hope to achieve within the boundaries of faith there is first of all wonderfully prayer I suspect two things are true most of us pray and yet the word means very different things to different people last year of the Pew Research Center in the US did an extensive survey of Americans and found that 55% of them 55% said that they prayed every day a similar British survey found actually you'd be surprised here that that one in seven claimed they would never pray only one in seven this is from a 2013 poll reported in The Guardian the most interesting fact for me to emerge from this latter survey the Guardian was that it was the youngest group those in their 20s with the least objection to praying the older you got the more you found praying a ridiculous notion young people can pray easily all the time I suspect children pray just by walking across the street so but it will be obvious to everyone here that prayer is a noun without easy definition that praying takes many forms I found the work of hansa you know auras von Balthasar I'm sure you're familiar with him very useful in thinking about prayer in his seminal work prayer that was translated in 1986 and published by the Ignatius press in America he studies the nature and practice of prayer he separates himself from the object 'less meditation of Eastern religions and suggests that Christian prayer involves a participation in the absolute that's very direct it's a way of being connected to the timelessness of God and involves a gaze that the Trinity itself that triune flame especially the Incarnate Word the divine logos both has ur rights or Balthasar rights man is a creature with a mystery in his heart that is bigger than himself he uses the analogy of the tabernacle suggest that each person is built like one with a secret garden inside that's usually neglected it is in Balthazar's Trinitarian philosophy of Prayer the Holy Spirit that paves the way between the human and the divine between mortal and in between the mortal and the immortal Jesus between each of us and God Balthazar formulates his idea like this quote there is the father who predestined and chooses us and adopts us as his children the son who interprets the father to us and gives him to us in his self surrender unto death and the mystery of the bread there is the spirit who implants God's life in our souls and makes it makes it known it's a beautiful description of the Trinity I've never heard better the possibilities of Prayer are endless in fact one can frame the practice in many dimensions and there's a long and varied history of contemplation and prayer that I can simply gesture to hearing today saying this is the corners but nevertheless concluding that the cornerstone of faith is prayer talking to God is a way of participating in the living Spirit of God it's a way of finding God within ourselves that paradise within that Milton wrote about in the end of Paradise Lost I don't think one can get very far in the faith practice in any faith practice without some form of quiet contemplation of the Godhead listening for God allowing the spirit to inform us even teach us I'd suggest that prayer is more a form of listening than anything else a million miles from the kinds of Prayer one often hears inform and fundamentalist circles as in Oh God my car is making funny noises please let it not break down until I get to the football game right we have this thing in America called the prosperity gospel if you heard of that I happen to be in a motel the other day and one of these preachers came on he said I said my wife and I used to drive by this beautiful house and I my wife said Henry we got to have that house and I called up the real estate agent and it was five million dollars and so I got down on my knees in front of that house and I said God give me this house and he said I'm here to say to you all in my audience God gave me that house send money to the following number and God will give you a house called the prosperity gospel it's in such an outrage but in America it's amazing what will work well let's move on to the second thing observance Eliot and middle age became a warden of st. Stephen's Church in Kensington I once went there myself with mrs. Elliot who recalled that he visited this church almost daily he rose early going to Mass before breakfast returning to eat a light meal before he spent the morning at his desk he also went on regular retreats indeed the final quartet little getting was inspired by the small Anglican religious community founded at this site in Cambridgeshire in the early 17th century by Nicholas Farrar needless to say this was a high church community devoted to the Book of Common Prayer and to religious rituals is observance necessary then for the Christian life I would say yes of course it is a mere mortals need communion they need to gather around an altar they need to worship together to praise God to see themselves as part of a larger body what's often called the body of Christ public prayer communal confession sharing the sacred meal these are just parts of the pattern but they are useful parts and the observance of holidays holy days Saints days is important as this observance keeps us fastened to the faith lit up by its brighter moments I think it's easy to fall away to lose oneself and distract distraction Fitz Elliot's great phrase and overwhelm us it was in born burnt norton that he surveyed the commuters in london with their quote time ridden faces distracted from distraction by distraction that my friends describes me much of the time and probably you as well so we need observance which functions to bring us back to ourselves back to the possibilities of the spirit back to God now observance as a practice leads the direction of discipline which is in effect a widening of the notion of observance Eliot was himself a very disciplined man who adapted at a fairly early age to life working in a bank with its long hours and obvious pressures of conformity he dressed for work and went to the office year after year when I once visited mrs. Elliot at her flat in Kensington very close to here she took me into the bedroom and opened his closet door and there were 17 pinstripe suits every day he put on a pinstripe suit and she said he had 17 of them on the day of his death she just kept them there until about five years ago when she died about two years ago or something I don't know when so he dressed for work went to the office year after year in later years he'd spend the afternoon at Faber's the publishing house where he worked as a director as a writer he understood the discipline of tradition going back to Aristotle Horace and quintillion to a degree he acquired this love of tradition from Irving Babbitt his old professor at Harvard but an essays written after his conversion he took issue with the humanism of Irving Babbitt as with that of Matthew Arnold as an attempt to replace religion with art by 27 1927 Ellie had come to embrace the anglo-catholic vein of Christianity as he thought that enlightenment would only come within the practices of a sturdy tradition in 1951 he wrote that quote no man has ever climbed to the higher stages of the spiritual life who has not been a believer in a particular religion or at least a particular philosophy in his essay of 1930 religion without humanism he writes that the difficult discipline is the discipline of Trent and training of the emotions he added the only foot that he had only found this through dogmatic religion in a commentary that appeared in his journal The Criterion April 1932 he spoke of quote the discipline of an exact religious faith I'd suggest here Eliot is not just making an argument for theological rigidity that he loses to such a broad range of religions and traditions in Four Quartets implies that he valued many and varied religious disciplines including Hinduism and Buddhism both of which had been attracted him attractive to him at various stages in his life in East Coker he speaks of poetry as quote a raid on the inarticulate and I would venture that for him religious practice was conducive to this work of raiding Eliot knew that discipline was required in both writing and faith and that without a firm grip on what went before one could not really create in the moment the work of the poet as conceived by Elliot tells us about what the work of the Spirit meant to him and how we sought to practice his faith actively in an essay on Jacque Marita he noted that if poetry is not to become quote a lifeless repetition of forms then the poet must explore quote the frontiers of spirit he added rather cautiously the frontiers of spirit are more like the jungle which unless continuously kept under control is always ready to encroach and eventually obliterate the cultivated area so that discipline he refers to in the dry saw of Ages or to quote at length earlier involves more than mere repetition as in liturgical repetitions although Eliot as a poet and anglo-catholic loved those repetitions but he obviously remained aware of even fearful of the possibility that one's practice in either poetry or religion could sink into quote lifeless repetition the counterbalance lifeless or rote repetition is obviously the next word and thought thought as no of course Eliot believed in quote the direct sensuous apprehension of thought great phrase from his essay called the metaphysical poets he believed one must cultivate the union of thought and feeling to the point where the one became fused with the other this was a drive toward integration or wholeness and it requires conscious effort at least in Eliot's poetic practice he referred to quote a recreation of thought into feeling one imagines that in prayer in church while reading scriptures Eliot work to turn thought into feeling a process of apprehension the accession of sensory experience in ways that seem to transcend mundane realities those spots of time as the moment in the Rose Garden that one can hardly bear as in is the great line humankind cannot bear very much reality one of my favorite lines of Eliot's he liked it so much he used it twice it's in murder in the cathedral it's in it's in the four quartets humankind cannot bear very much reality it preface four quartets with two fragments as you may remember from Heraclitus the pre-socratic philosopher one of them seems relevant here when thinking about faith the quotation in english goes roughly like this although there is one Center one center most people live in centers of their own well here's the discipline of thought focusing on the center which is of course just another word for God the practice of faith demands attention to one Center not the ordinary and disastrous life of secular unconsciousness the descent into subjectivity has long seemed the most sophisticated even cool way to live Center is really a version of the Greek word logos which is the underlying intelligibility of the world the shaping of reality that underlies all consciousness a philosophical version of the unified field theory that has obsessed physicists in the modern age I think Eliot's thought drives us toward this unified field toward this center toward the word or logos that was there at the beginning as in the opening lines of John's Gospel in the beginning was the word in his coker Elliot tells himself I said to my soul be still that stillness he suggests involves waiting quote the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting he says firmly wait without thought for you were not ready for Thought talking himself there this is a wonderful description of meditation or prayer waiting allowing consciousness to fill slowly moving toward what Elliot calls the stillness the dancing this is the still point of the turning world it's the seeking for God here in waiting and waiting for thought but thought is an absent it comes before and after the stillness it prepares the ground for the center it comes after the moment in the rose garden after the encounter with God as reflection many critics have noted that the Four Quartets moved from intense or symbolic images or moments of almost mystical vision to abstract discursive passages as in I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant I've always thought that line it's actually I always tell my students it's one of the worst lines of English poetry right it's like cop gets the wind over the worst second worst line in English poetry is my heart in hiding stirred for a bird sorry Gerard that doesn't make it yet I love my heart in hiding I summarize love I sometimes wonder if that I can see Ellie with his fake English accent you know I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant my English accent it's as good as Elliot's which of course refers to the Bhagavad Gita Eliot shows us Eliot thinking here which is really a form of wandering he wonders about the strangers of time the flux that has life and the communal work of consciousness I say communal because as the quotation from Heraclitus suggests Eliot's trying to move beyond the isolation of the individual beyond subjectivity and here practice comes in once again religious practice insists of course on community we gather together to ask the Lord's blessing we become one body and so forth the power of the practice is the power of community the looking outward as well as looking inward that faith demands and this leads us to the final prong of Eliot's five things right the final prong action one thinks of the letter of James verse 217 faith by itself if not accompanied by action is dead powerful stuff one can't resist thinking of the Eightfold Path of Buddhism here which directs us out of the cycles of life and death these involve right understanding or vision right intention right speech right action Right Livelihood right effort right mindfulness and right concentration I would say that all of these are forms of action moving in the world reaching outward suffering is alienation from God in both Buddhism and Christianity the way of Jesus involves making choices about how we live among our neighbors do we treat them like ourselves do we love and our neighbor do we love God in our neighbor which is probably the only way one can indeed love God as that the Desert Fathers taught on if you know that much about the Desert Fathers but Rowan Williams is written beautifully about about all of this loving God in our neighbor of course one could see the entire Sermon on the Mount as a theoretical guide to right action it's also a discourse on karma at least in the notion that whatever one says when eventually reaps in a larger sense the entire life of Christ might be taken as a guide to right action or ethical behavior Jesus didn't simply say that we should love our neighbors as ourselves he showed us how to accomplish this he focused on the poor those who were blessed in the Beatitudes he lived communally with his disciples sharing meals praying putting into practice ideals that rose in the process of thought he had no pretensions and sought the company of those on the margins prostitutes the lame the mentally ill the hungry he sat with lepers he knelt with others and prayed right action in Eliot no doubt suggest living an ethical life conceived in terms that seemed fairly consistent with all the world's religions and the elements of which are evident in the eighth polled path as well as in the Ten Commandments Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount which reformulates redefines and extends the law of Moses as when Jesus put forward those wonderful antitheses as so an eye for an eye becomes turn the other cheek so forth one could go on about that it would be a mistake however not to see that there is individual effort and right action call young the psychologist once suggested that right action comes from right thinking and there's no cure and no improving the world that does not begin with the individual himself or herself this means discernment knowing the right thing to do when obeys God of course because one discern that this is the right thing to do and discernment is part of action and it means being awake to what is going on as noted in 1 John 3:17 18 if anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them how can the love of God be in that person dear children let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth amazing stuff in 1935 Elliott published his great essay religion and literature his summary statement on the connection between these closely related practices he didn't wish to see literature as divorced from ethics from religious thought from the pursuit of God's kingdom quote I wrote I am convinced that we fail to realize how completely and yet how irrationally we separate our literary from our religious judgments Eliot wrote it seems obvious that he denounced Eliot wrote so it seems obvious to me that he didn't make this mistake in his own life I'd go further in Four Quartets especially in the fifth section of the Dreyse of Ages he offers this sublime pattern for Christian living asking us to think about prayer observance discipline thought and action in fresh ways he invites us to kneel quote where prayer has been valid as he says in little kidding his work remains for me and for many readers like me I suspect a rather Stern but salutary guide to religious practice as he fuses thought and feeling as he urges us to wait in stillness to listen to the voice and to discern what we must do thank you very much they sleep you

Channel: Power of the Word Projects

Views: 3,657

Rating: 4.8139534 out of 5

Keywords: jay parini, philosophy, theology, religious studies, poetry, literature, power of the word, ethics, t.s. eliot, the four quartets, heythrop college, university, london

Id: 8s3EtOnKoDo

Length: 53min 14sec (3194 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2016