The Refiner’s Fire: T. S. Eliot

The Poet As Prophet

In a letter to a friend of his, T. S. Eliot once said, “You cannot conceive of truth at all, the word has no meaning, except by conceiving of it as something permanent.”

That is not an observation likely to attract much enthusiasm in our own epoch. The general notion abroad now is that we come at the truth of things and ourselves by incessantly innovating, and that in so far as an idea is well worn, it is probably false; nay, that truth itself is a “dynamic” affair, growing, modifying, changing, as we continually recast the molds in which we propose to receive it.

The commonplace “We now know,” with its variants “Science has proved” and “Research has shown,” is brought to bear with all the weight and solemnity that modernity can amass on question after question. For example, it was all very well and good for the ancients to suppose that the gods had something to do with the universe we live in, but of course We Now Know that this was all whistling in the dark. Science has proved.… Or, similarly, it was a very fine thing for those same ancients to speak of God with a royal vocabulary, but We Now Know that all that imagery of God’s majesty was culturally determined, and has nothing to do with anything beyond the borders of tribal imagination. Or again, it was one thing for these people to circumscribe human relations by confining sexual congress inside holy bonds, but We Now Know that that sprang from a superstitious and adolescent understanding of human relationships, and, having come of age ourselves, we can define our own (new) relationships, choosing on an ad hoc basis what appeals to us, and jettisoning the outworn proscriptions.

And so forth. In politics, behavior, ethics, art, and the sciences, the desideratum is the “breakthrough.” Frontiers are there to be crossed; bonds are there to be snapped; taboos are there to be overleaped. If the angels won’t rush in, get them out of the way.

The Christian imagination is perplexed by this sort of thing, in that it does suspect that in the end, there are “permanent things” (Eliot’s phrase), and that there are mysteries on whose hither side the angels do well to falter, and that taboo may well be the recognition of a real interdict. But on the other hand, the Christian is obliged not only to grant but to welcome thousands of the “breakthroughs” accomplished by that very curiosity and derring-do which has so damaged the supposed permanent things. Which breakthroughs shall we welcome? Copernicus? Galileo? Magellan? Of course. Darwin? Freud? Germaine Greer? Well, ah.…

It is not, then, a question of change vs. no change. We live in “merry middle earth” (C. S. Lewis’s phrase), and can’t ever get things quite fixed. We do have to be tinkering. It is the question of how we are to know, and knowing, to preserve, the really permanent things. Which things, if any, are off limits? We destroyed the flat-earth concept: may we destroy the male/female distinction? We scotched the geocentric theory: may we scotch the marriage theory? We got rid of the gods: may we get rid of the children-obey-your-parents notion?

It is not easy to find the border beyond which it is unlawful to venture. And the whole matter is queered for us nowadays by everyman’s terror lest he be found to be “reactionary.” Not to be briskly in the van of contemporaneity is to be a eunuch.

It is to our uncertainty and anxiety in the face of ambiguities like this that the voice of the prophet speaks. At least part of the function of the prophet has been to recall the people to the permanent things, and to articulate freshly for them what those things are in order that they may be grasped firmly once again.

If there are prophetic figures in our own century, one of them is surely T. S. Eliot. Most of us run into his work only in an English class (if at all), and then it is only “Prufrock” and “The Waste Land.” Perhaps we see a production of Murder in the Cathedral once during our lifetime.

But this will not do. At the crunch in which we find ourselves in history, with morals in tatters, public sensibility in hot pursuit of the bizarre, the growtesque, and the brutal, and the imagination of decent people everywhere stunned and hesitant, it is not overstating the case to say that a great deal of what needs to be said right now has been said for us in our own time by this man.

It is an ancient exercise, and a salutary one, for people to recall their ancestors’ wisdom. Our own Scriptures are full of exhortations to do so: and the Greeks, and all medieval and Renaissance men, knew the value of hearking back to “auctoritee,” that is to wisdom uttered by men long dead (which wisdom, contrary to our own suppositions, was held to have gathered weight by its very antiquity).

T. S. Eliot has been dead only a decade, but already his words seem oracular in their clairvoyant relevance to our situation. Indeed, this oracular quality about his pronouncements irritated his critics even while he was still alive. Of the many studies of Eliot that have appeared, none that I know of deals so massively with Eliot’s whole vision, particularly with respect to the alarming issues of public imagination and morals in our epoch, as Russell Kirk’s Eliot and His Age, published at the start of our decade (Random House, 1971). We might not do wrong to pull it off the shelf, here in the middle as it were, and see what we can see.

Eliot, Kirk says, “labored to renew the wardrobe of a moral imagination,” by which he means, using Burke’s definition, “that power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and events of the moment.” It aspires to apprehend “right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth.” Eliot felt, like Burke, “ ‘that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality.…’ ” At least part of his achievement was to reinvigorate for us “those perennial moral insights which are the sources of human normality, and which make possible order and justice and freedom.”

Now this is nonsense to the doctrinaire modern, who is committed to innovation, creativity, and experiment on all fronts, moral and psychological as well as educational and scientific. The notion of there being some fixed order that presides over the changes and chances of time and fashion, and that judges these ephemera, is abhorrent to the central doctrine of Modernism, namely, the doctrine of “progress,” understood as self-validating innovation.

Eliot, sometimes almost alone, it seemed, stood over against the avalanche of Modernism. He believed in the “older certitudes,” and in “the painfully acquired wisdom of the species.” He wrote in 1948 that “we are destroying our ancient edifices ‘to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans.’ ”

In his early poetry and comment, written before he became a Christian, Eliot articulated for us the ennui, impotence, debility, solitude, and senescence of modern man, with images that hail us with the horror of Hell itself. We all know poor Prufrock, with his trousers rolled and his hesitation over the challenge of eating a peach. And “the Waste Land” with its dismaying bar rooms and “the young man carbuncular” and its “empty chapel, only the wind’s home,” and so forth. This poem in particular enraged the modernists. Kirk puts it this way:

“Eliot,” they say, “is snobbishly contrasting the alleged glory and dignity of the Past with what he takes for the degradation of the democratic and industrialized Present. This is historically false and ought to be repudiated by all Advanced Thinkers” [p. 81].

Not so, says Kirk:

The Present, Eliot knew, is only a thin film upon the deep well of the Past.… The ideological cult of Modernism is philosophically ridiculous, for the modernity of 1971, say, is very different from the modernity of 1921. One cannot order his soul, or participate in a public order, merely by applauding the will-o’-the-wisp Present [p. 82].

In this connection Eliot proclaimed himself a “classicist” (as well as a royalist and an Anglo-Catholic, not one of which claims was particularly welcome to his contemporaries). He meant that he lived within Tradition, and that, as Kirk has it, “he stood for right reason, as opposed to obsession with alleged originality, personality, and creativity; for the permanent things, as opposed to the lust for novelty; for normality, as opposed to abnormality” (p. 146).

Moreover, Eliot distrusted what we might call the intellectual democracy of liberalism. He said this about liberalism:

“[It] tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax, rather than to fortify … by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy. Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos” [p. 277].

As is frequently (always?) the case with the prophetic imagination, Eliot’s political and social concerns sprang from his prior vision of an order that defined and judged our life, one that we ignored or flouted, in our morals and politics and imagination, to our own damnation. In Eliot’s case, of course, that order was the biblical accounting of the universe, received and passed on in the magisterium of the Church. He attributed the disorder and havoc that especially mark our epoch to our having cut the moorings of tradition and dogma that held us to our true center. On point after point, his analysis of the modern situation derives directly from a particular Christian assumption.

For instance, Eliot saw our groping about in aesthetics, political activism, social engineering, and tepid benevolence for answers to the staggering problems of society, and our utter impotence to come to any understanding much less solution, as an index of our loss of the sense of Original Sin:

“If you do away with this struggle, and maintain that by tolerance, benevolence, inoffensiveness, and a redistribution or increase of purchasing power, combined with a devotion, on the part of an elite, to Art, the world will be as good as anyone could require, then you must expect human beings to become more and more vaporous” [p. 213].

Again, Eliot might astound us by tracing the fascination with evil and abnormality, in modern fiction, drama, and painting to a denial of the Incarnation. Kirk says:

If one denies the divine incarnation, Eliot believed, one must affirm a different though inferior power. The diabolical enters into literature, and into society, when we grow fascinated with “the unregenerate personality” [p. 215].

Or again, Eliot saw the paradox of the modern effort to liberalize and democratize the human order coexisting with an apparently incorrigible drift toward totalitarianism on the Left as well as the Right, and he suspected that you get this paradox when you try to build a social edifice on any foundation other than religious truth. Kirk quotes Eliot:

“No scheme for a change of society can be made to appear immediately palatable, except by falsehood … until society has become so desperate that it will accept any change.” The alternative to a totalist order … is a social order founded upon religious truth. “That prospect involves, at least, discipline, inconvenience, and discomfort; but here as hereafter the alternative to hell is purgatory” [p. 417],

Eliot set the utopianism of modern liberal ideology over against the transcendence of Christian revelation. Kirk speaks of Eliot’s opposition to “the pseudo-religion of ideology—which inverts the religious symbols of transcendence, promising here and now, upon earth and tomorrow, the perfection of our nature that religion promises through salvation of the soul” (p. 171). The Social Gospel was, for Eliot, “the Great Commandment with its first clause excised.”

In his drama as well as in his poetry and his criticism, Eliot tried to introduce once more into contemporary sensibility at least the acknowledgment of the permanent, and of the transcendent that judges us. If he could only, somehow, pluck modern men by the elbow and remind them of this much, perhaps the ground would be that much broken to receive the full message, eventually, of what it is (or Who, really) that judges us. Kirk says, “If he could not redeem the stage from Bernard Shaw, at least he might remind the public that there persist older views of the human condition than the Shavina” (p. 403).

But Eliot never supposed that what he had to say would win the day:

“We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph” [p. 418].

A desperate frame of mind? Some call it that. But Eliot knew history, tradition, and Christian dogma too well to be able to look with anything more than a tentative and proximate hope on even the very best efforts of society towards amelioration. And he also saw that it is seldom indeed that those efforts can be called “best.”

Any Christian, in any century, finds himself in a highly ambiguous relation to his society, knowing as he does that he must applaud and assist in any genuine effort to bring justice and mercy to bear on public life, but knowing at the same time that Christian imagination can never hold out any but the bleakest expectations for these efforts. Somehow we build Babel and not Jerusalem every time. The clarity and keenness of Eliot’s criticism of our epoch, if it will not save us (as he knew it would not save him), may at least define and articulate the nature of our (Christians’, that is) confrontation with that epoch, and in so doing, may at least save us from mere muddle, which brings it fear. And, for those of us who cannot tackle the entire corpus of Eliot’s writing itself, Russell Kirk has done a rare and encouraging service.

Thomas Howard is associate professor of English at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts.

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