Tag Archives: T.S. Eliot

Back Again Into the Wasteland

17 Wednesday Feb 2021

Posted by in Church/State, Lent, poetry, Tolkien

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The Hollow Men 5A note from Neo

Well, I’m back again, not that I really left, I’ve been posting on the Neo blog, as many of you know, because that has been more appropriate to my thoughts lately. I have been thinking of you though, there are a fair number of us here, but we tend to be, I suspect a good bit alike, and if you’re like me, you feel very much like a sojourner in a strange land.

Today is, of course, Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, when we traditionally give up things by which we commemorate Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, as we prepare ourselves for Easter.

I first republished this article of Jessica’s on Ash Wednesday in 2015, it is from 10 March 2013 originally on NEO and is quite similar to the one here also on 10 March 2013 called Mere Anarchy. I found the NEO version a bit more understandable, but I link them both because you may well differ. At the time I reblogged this well, it was a troubled time in my life, you who knew Jessica then will know that this was while she was at the Convent recovering from cancer, and our contact was severely limited. But God be praised that worked out. Here is Jessica’s post.

Into the Wasteland

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

The opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s 1925 poem speak with eloquence to any age and people who feel disconnected from what they feel is a calamitous and collapsing socio-political world.

Eliot was writing in the aftermath of the most catastrophic war in the history of the Western world. It was the war when hope died. How could one believe in progress after the Somme and the horrors of the Western Front? And what had all of that slaughter been for? A settlement at Versailles which few believed would really bring peace to the world.  Men like Wilson and Hoover, or MacDonald and Baldwin, seemed small men facing giant problems, and sure enough, within fifteen years the world had once more descended into the abyss.

Does the fault lie in our leaders? They do, indeed, seem to be hollow men, with heads stuffed with straw. The words of Yeats’ Second Coming seem apposite to our times:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

Writing in 1919, Yeats wondered:   

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand

But it was not so. In Lord of the Rings, Frodo tells Gandalf that he wishes he did not live in the time he did, when such dreadful things were happening. Gandalf’s reply is for all of us:

So do I,’  said Gandalf, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’

It is not for us to decide such things. All each of us can do in the end is to decide how we live our lives and by what star we steer. Those of us with a Christian faith, like Tolkien himself, know we are strangers in this world, and we know by whose star we steer. We can rage all we like against the way the world seems to be going, so did our forefathers, and so will our descendants. Eliot ends with a dying fall:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

But Yeats, in best prophetic mode wondered:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

For me, Eliot’s words in Ash Wednesday ring truest:

Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

That’s pretty much what the world feels like, increasingly to me, at least, it seems that we may have to simply burn it down and try to rebuild in the ruins. but I continue to hope not, so we will see.

In many ways, Kipling asked the question I think our political, and a fair share of church, as well, leadership should have to answer

I could not dig; I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

But as Jess said above, we don’t get to pick the era in which we live, we are simply called to do the best we can. And so we shall, God willing.  NEO

The silent God?

04 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Faith, Newman, poetry, Prayers

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“Thus religious truth is neither light nor darkness, but both together; it is like the dim view of a country seen in the twilight, which forms half extricated from the darkness, with broken lines and isolated masses.”

Religion without dogma made no sense to Newman; without that it was “mere sentiment” – and that was a foundation of sand. But he was well aware of the limits of humanity and acknowledged that the application of the intellect to religious matters might well produce a diminution of faith. It was, he commented, as though it was assumed that theologians were “too intellectual to be spiritual” and thus “more occupied with the truths of doctrine than with its reality.”

For Catholics the Church is the rock upon which dogma rests; we accept the historical reality of the Revelation it transmits to us. But intellect alone will not suffice; that is where prayer and devotional practices are needed; we do not worship by brain-power. For Newman,“Revealed religion should be especially poetical – and it is so in fact.” Prose was inadequate to convey the Truth of revealed religion, but, without an Authority to pronounce on revelation and tradition, private judgement would simply lead to the sort of chaos he came to discern within the Church of England in his own day. Thus, the mixture of light and dark in the quotation which heads up this essay.

Although we are each the subject of our own experiences, and whilst Christ came to save each of us, our egos are but a vehicle when it comes to understanding that Christ Himself is at the centre of our Faith. The central truth of the Christian Faith is the Incarnation. God became man and died that we should have eternal life. And yet knowing this, we can, nonetheless, in times such as this lose sight of this and, in despair, wonder why God is silent in the face of our prayers for healing and safety.

Much prose has been given over to the problem of why God allows mankind to suffer – the technical term is theodicy. But the intervention which speaks most to my heart is the poem, “Denaill” by George Herbert:

When my devotions could not pierce
Thy silent ears;
Then was my heart broken, as was my verse:
My breast was full of fears
And disorder

This is no intellectual exercise, it is the heart-felt anguish of the poet who agonises at what he feels is God’s refusal of his prayerful requests. He feels abandoned, as though his soul has no mooring. It is only in close reading that we see that the poet is, himself, in “denial”. Each stanza concludes with a last line which does not rhyme – except for the last one which concludes:

 O cheer and tune my heartless breast,
Defer no time;
That so thy favours granting my request,
They and my mind may chime,
And mend my rhym

Which, of course, is a rhyme. God has answered, it is the poet who has been in denial. God’s answer may not be the one we expect; it maybe that we are not listening.

We are made in God’s image; but we are not God. How much we long for a God whom we can understand, as well as worship, how often we think that God is absent; but how often to we think that it is we who are absent, we who are deaf?

T.S. Eliot, as so often, expresses it best in the first part of Little Gidding:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

We have to put away our worldly concerns. Our intellects can rest secure on the rock of the dogma proclaimed by the Church. What should concern us is prayer, and even the best of prayers is but the antechamber to our encounter with God. We intersect with the past and the present, the living and dead, and above all with Him whose Kingdom shall have no end.

God is not silent; we lack the ears with which to hear Him if we think so.

A Christian society?

28 Tuesday Feb 2017

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Education, Faith, Politics

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The question arises as to what Eliot meant when he wrote about a ‘Christian society’. The first thing to note is that he did not think that the British and American society he inhabited in the 1930s was one. That society was, at best, he thought, neutral. Its values and laws were shaped by a Christian heritage, but these were, he thought, in danger of becoming vestigial; at best Western society was neutral – at least it did not actively persecute anyone for being a Christian. What was true in the 1930s is no longer so; what was vestigial then is fossilised now, and it is very easy to be prosecuted for being an orthodox Christian. At the bare minimum, a Christian society ought to be one which promotes a Christian way of life. It is not a search for an abstraction of a set of principles, it is the recognition and promotion of a way of living which recognises that man’s destiny is eternal, and that the things of this world are, at best, a means to an end, that end being eternal life. This has profound implications for what we think the ends of education are, and for how we define concepts such as ‘success’ and ‘failure’; it is a radical call to humility and to the recognition of the reality of the effects of original sin. At the very least it is a call to be sceptical about the utopian solutions peddled by liberalism, and to be cautious about changing the status quo except with evidence that it runs counter to the Gospel message. So, to take two practical examples: it would argue that slavery was bad because it encouraged the dehumanisation of the individual and ran counter to the message of Jesus; but it would argue that changing the status of marriage was a bad idea for the same reason. Why was man created as he was? The ends to which God intended mankind are actively promoted by the traditional Christian idea of marriage; that it also has a variety of desirable social outcomes is no accident; we do best as a species when we follow the lines laid down for us by God. To be blunt, He knew what what He was doing – and we don’t.

Does such a route require of us self-discipline, self-abnegation and and some discomfort? If so, the chances are we are on the right road; if not, the chances point the other way. Such a State would not be limited to having only Christians as its members, for its values are ones which people of all faiths should be able to see the virtues of; neither would it be a narrowly confessional State. As Eliot put it, a Christian society should be one in which those who govern, whatever their particular religious beliefs and personal preferences, are confined

by the temper and traditions of the people which they rule, to a Christian framework within which to realize their ambitions and advance the prosperity and prestige of their country. They may frequently perform un-Christian acts; they must never attempt to defend their actions on un-Christian principles” (CC, 23)

For this to happen, education would be crucial. If the young are not reared in the maxims and principles of the Gospel message, and if they do not see it preached and practised, then the Christian society cannot come into existence. So, what would such an education look like? To that I shall attempt to return in my next post.

The negativity of liberalism

27 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Faith, Politics

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Liberalism. Eliot observed was teleologically negative. It sought to liberate mankind from what it considered the shackles of antiquity, as task which, in itself, required the possession of a fine conceit of oneself: on the one hand the accumulated wisdom of the ages; on the other your own intellect. None of which is to say that there are not some things which always need reforming, but which is to say, with Eliot, that:

By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, 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 negative: the artificial, mechanized or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos. (CC, 12)

Organic development often looks chaotic and in need to rationalisation, but those who call for that so often throw out the baby with the bathwater, not realising that things which have existed for a long time have tended to do so because of some inherent virtue; we should be wary of changing things unless we understand the ways in which the changes we want will be for the better – that is Eliot’s plea, or at least part of it.

It is all very well for liberalism claim, as it used to (and bits of it still do), that religion is a matter of private practice, but it becomes increasingly difficult to love a Christian life in this society. I pay my taxes (don’t remind me) and in so doing I am paying for abortion on the NHS; if I ran a small business and I refused to put a slogan supporting gay marriage onto a cake or a garment, I should find myself liable to a penalty under law; the State itself had to insert clauses into its own laws to stop the Church being forced to allow gay marriages to take place on its premises -which has not stopped Christians going to court to try to make the Church do what it secured an exemption from doing. To oppose these modish causes is to find oneself labelled a bigot and, as more than one good Catholic blogger has found, to be inundated with hate from those who say that ‘love trumps hate and have no sense of irony. The pressures to de-Christianise are many; the pressures to stick to Christian orthodoxy few.

Christian culture is not an abstract concept, it is a way of life, a society which understands implicitly certain norms, and where behaviour is regulated as much by such understandings as it is by the law; indeed the law is in many ways the final resort, to be used only when an individual deliberately violates the custom and practice of the parish – a custom and a practice build around Christian norms. Self-satisfaction and selfishness are inbuilt parts of our fallen nature, and they are not to be combatted by secular means alone – or perhaps not at all by such means. We can mandate compassion through taxation, but what we get is money to be distributed by the State and a disinterested set of taxpayers who assume their duty is discharged by the payment of taxes.

But what was it Eliot meant when he wrote about a Christian society? It is to that theme, God willing, I shall return in future posts.