[Paul Lake]

Jody Bottum will be chairing a panel on Religion and Poetry at the West Chester conference in June. Below is a link to an excellent essay on T. S. Eliot--on his poetry and spirituality--by Jody. I highly recommend it.
http://print.firstthings.com/ftissue...08/bottum.html

[Joseph Bottum]

Dear Paul,

Thanks for noticing this old essay of mine--and thanks, too, to JS Renau for quoting from it in Contemporary Poetry Review and thus sending you to it.

I should say, though, that "What T.S. Eliot Almost Believed" was only the second essay I'd ever published in a popular or mainstream magazine, and it is very much a work by a young wannabe critic: driven by an overwrought thesis and running on overwrought prose. Lines like "'Gerontion' is a failure, of course" now serve mostly to embarrass me. My "Selected Essays" are coming out in book form next year, and I did decide to include this essay--but modified with the rethinking I did after Christopher Ricks brought out Eliot's juvenilia.

But tell us here at Eratosphere what it is that you're coming to see about Eliot's religion and poetry--about everyone's religious poetry, for that matter.

Jody

[Chris Childers]

Dear Jody,

I was fascinated by your essay, though I do admit to having balked a bit at such lines as you quote. I would love to hear whether or not you still believe this about Eliot, that he did not have faith so much as an understanding that he needed faith. Your discussion of Augustine caught my attention, too, though I don't claim to have entirely understood it, especially the part about Bradley's Hegelianism. How have you escaped the cycle of self-consciousness, and achieved faith? This might be a difficult question to answer, though. Regards,

Chris

[Joseph Bottum]

Dear Chris,

I still believe several of the claims that I made about Eliot's poetry--although I would be more careful today ascribing them to the poetry rather than the poet, and I'd certainly phrase them differently. I confess even I no longer understand my claim that the ethical studies reveal F.H. Bradley's turn from Hegelian rationalism to Augustinian voluntarism, and how that turn suggests something deep about T.S. Eliot's poetry. I was smarter nine years ago when I wrote the essay, and a whole lot more confident.

Nonetheless, I think I'd still be willing to argue:

(1) Eliot may want God to bridge the abyss in the poems from "Ash Wednesday" on, but the trouble is that, in the poems up to "The Hollow Men," he made the abyss so big that probably nothing could bridge it. George Orwell once quipped that the early Eliot had pulled off the nearly impossible feat of making modern times seem worse even than it actually is. The lines of stuttered incompletion in "The Hollow Men" are used to suggest the failure of any possible consumation, while the same sort of lines are used in "Ash Wednesday" to suggest that just beyond the poem lies a consumation. But I imagine that if "The Hollow Men" is right, the solution of "Ash Wednesday" is insufficient.

(2) From the very beginning, Eliot understood what we might call the "Matthew Arnold Problem": God is necessary for an intelligible account of the world, and the perceived fading in Western culture of belief in God was stripping the world of intelligibility. What's more, he grasped (as I think Arnold never really did) that we don't magically cobble up some second-order intelligibility by understanding that the world isn't any longer essentially understandable.

(3) The intellect remains for Eliot the organ of faith, just as rationalism (or, rather, a rational recognition of the need for supra-rationalism) remains the philosophical support for the search for faith.

(4) This leads Eliot into certain theological troubles in Four Quartets. He borrows language from such Christian mystics as Julian of Norwich. But they used that language to describe the mystical experience: the point where irrational faith gives way to supra-rational knowledge. Eliot uses it instead to describe the point where rational knowledge gives way to irrational faith. He confuses the experience of faith with the experience of God--the would-be believer's waiting for faith with the already-believing believer's waiting for God. He's replaced what St. Augustine called "faith seeking understanding" with understanding seeking faith. Within the poetry, Eliot knows he needs belief, rather than believing he needs to know.

Jody