LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

MISREADINGS OF ELIOT'S
OVER- AND UNDER-STATEMENTS

(Faltering between Believing and Wishful Thinking)

For quite a while, it used to be taken for granted that Eliot was a religious (even fervently religious) man, who had broken off with the Unitarian background of his American childhood and adolescence, and had chosen to worship the Anglican God instead. Various biographies, numberless witnesses testify to the fact that, at least beginning with the time he was 40, he would go to church early every morning. In 1928, he himself wrote in his Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes:

‘The general point of view may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion’.

If he himself had made it that clear, why should anyone have taken the trouble of questioning the assertion? Together with the man's religious sensibility, the religiosity of his poetry was also taken for granted. Some decades later, in To Criticize the Critic (1965), Eliot somehow discredited his statement of 1928 as being too final, too self-assured. The words seemed to him to be no longer a felicitous description of his state of mind, either at the time when they had actually been written, or at the time of their later re-appraisal.

There is no denying that Eliot really felt attracted by something in the religious ritual. Was it because of the religious mood proper, or just because of the dramatization of that state of mind in a way both acutely physical and yet essentially metaphysical? Or was it because of the never exhausted ability to produce a rapid, vivid and shattering impression, which the picturesque words of the Bible excel in? Some biographer recalls that once, towards the end of Eliot's life, the writer was appointed on a committee that was supposed to revise the text of the Bible and make it more understandable to younger (and less cultivated) audiences. Eliot was the only person there who indomitably opposed any change whatever. He behaved as if each word of the Bible were sacred to him. There is no denying that his poetry abounds in  echoes. Yet, we shall never know the real meaning of Eliot's (once) professed religiosity. The only thing left of it are his words: his poems, his essays and some of his plays.

It is no secret that practically all the critical works on Eliot, written over a long span of years, some older, some quite recent, have treated Eliot's religiosity with at least religious (if not fervently religious) respect. The man says he believes in God. How can the critic ignore the statement? If a critic tried to be more imaginative, would he not be frightened out of it by the scrutinizing frown of Eliot's ghost at spotting an imaginative critic – imagine! – busy at fumbling his way through his own (Eliot's) work? It might be reminded here, with due irony of course, that Eliot's own name, Thomas, had a hint at irreverent questioning in it. It sends our thoughts directly to the doubting Thomas of the New Testament, who used to say he would never believe in Christ's resurrection until he could hold some palpable proof of it in his hand. The sacred text says that God's son showed himself to doubting Thomas and asked: ‘Look, here are my wounds, can you deny feeling them?’ Doubting Thomas is afterwards said to have abandoned his doubting mood and become an apostle: a man who preached to the world what he had previously doubted. I am afraid this happy end is not the case of Eliot at all. His words speak for themselves. What made me start in pursuit of Eliot's disbelieving mood was that Eliot's is a highly ambiguous poetry, whose main weapon is the understatement. The question is, therefore, when one finds over-statements in an avaricious, elliptical poet's work, should one take them for granted? Is his clarity our own? Do we mean the same things when we use the same words? With this question in mind (a question indeed: no intention of producing out of a cap the unexpected image of Eliot the atheist), I have attempted here some willful mis-readings of Eliot's religious over-statements. I have been trying to decide whether, after years of reading and re-reading Eliot's poems, instead of merely darting out ‘here is a religious poet’, it would be more accurate to say, here is a poet and a man faltering between belief and the need to believe, between belief and wishful thinking.

GERONTION

ASH-WEDNESDAY