The Christian Criticism of T.S. Eliot

I

For the young to understand the esteem in which T.S. Eliot (1882-1965) was held from the 1920s to the 1980s, they need to exercise a degree of historical imagination that most of them will never muster. Eliot’s authority was of an immensity. As one of his best critical legatees, Richard Ellmann confirmed in the entry he wrote on Eliot for the National Dictionary of Biography (DNB) nearly twenty years after the poet critic’s death, Eliot “was the man of letters par excellence of the English-speaking world.” For Joyce’s biographer, Eliot’s “eminence became, in fact, a hazard to young poets who felt that their fundamental aesthetic problem was to avoid imitating him.”

No poets illustrated the force of this hazard more than Hart Crane, Allen Tate, and Anthony Hecht, all of whose highly allusive, technically intricate verse would have been impossible without the example of Eliot. W.H. Auden, whose stylistic versatility owed a good deal to Eliot’s influence, recognized that if imitating Eliot profitably was beyond most poets, his indirect influence was inescapable. Speaking of his contemporaries and himself, Auden confessed, “None of us imitated him exactly by taking up a bowler hat and a tightly rolled umbrella” but he still taught Auden and his young friends that “a poet’s conduct is subject to exactly the same moral judgments as that of a person in any walk of life.”

It was the good man in Eliot, in other words, who most impressed his contemporaries. In an obituary for Eliot, Auden drove home the quality of this influence when he remarked:

Provided he does not die young, before he has given the world the works that he has to give it, the death of a poet is no loss. His poems are there. The death of a good man is a real and irreparable loss to all who were fortunate to have known him.

Ellmann echoed Auden’s sentiments by commending the poet critic as one whose “courtesy, self-abnegation and kindness were celebrated.” Eliot’s only reputable biographer, Lyndall Gordon, confirmed this in recognizing that, for all his sins, “He strove to content himself with right action, that saving grace would come to fill the waiting vessel of perfected conduct.”

Then, too, Eliot was as influential as he was because he knew how to make his opinions tell. Bernard Shaw once recalled that it was Handel who taught him “that style consists in force of assertion. If you can say a thing with one stroke unanswerably you have style…” The decided critic in Eliot could wield this force at will, though in later life he would temper it with elaborate qualification. Nevertheless, shortly after Ellmann published his DNB entry, the denunciations began, and they have never stopped since. Eliot continues to be assailed as elitist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, reactionary, racist, and even fascist. If none of these aspersions has any validity, they do explain why he continues to incur the abomination of the antinomian world.

After all, he was a fierce critic of that world. What did he say of the world that his contemporaries had made for themselves? “Here was a decent godless people/Their only monument the asphalt road/and a million lost golf balls.”

The essays included in the 4-volume Collected Prose of T.S. Eliot, edited by Archie Burnett, reveal not only the extent to which his longing for Christian faith animated Eliot’s critical judgment but the consistent brilliance of the criticism. In 1936, while readying himself for the writing of Four Quartets (1936-42), the composition which above all others charts the depths of his longing for conversion, he was categorical about what he saw as the relation between faith and literature. “Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint,” he wrote in “Religion and Literature”:

In so far as in any age there is common agreement on ethical and theological matters, so far can literary criticism be substantive. In ages like our own, in which there is no such common agreement, it is the more necessary for Christian readers to scrutinize their reading, especially of works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological standards. The ‘greatness’ of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.

The characteristic qualification here in no way diminished the boldness of his claim in a world that regarded religion as simply retrograde – a world, as the critic put it himself, in which many “have never heard of the Christian Faith spoken of as anything other than an anachronism.” Of course, in the 1930s, there were readers who were familiar with and even enjoyed the Bible but Eliot had reservations about the nature of such enjoyment. “While I acknowledge the legitimacy of this enjoyment,” he conceded, “I am more acutely aware of its abuse.” Why? “The persons who enjoy these writings solely because of their literary merit are essentially parasites; and we know that parasites, when they become too numerous, are pests. I could fulminate against the men of letters who have gone into ecstasies over ‘the Bible as literature’, the Bible as ‘the noblest monument of English prose’. Those who talk of the Bible as a ‘monument of English prose’ are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.” For the finely discriminating critic in Eliot, it was axiomatic that “the Bible has had a literary influence upon English literature not because it has been considered as literature, but because it has been considered as the report of the Word of God…”

For Eliot, those heedless of the religious essence of the Bible made themselves captive to a stultifying present. In defense of this reasoning, Eliot mounted an argument as true of our contemporaries as it was of his:

For the reader of contemporary literature is not, like the reader of the established great literature of all time, exposing himself to the influence of divers and contradictory personalities; he is exposing himself to a mass movement of writers who, each of them, think that they have something individually to offer, but are really all working together in the same direction. And there never was a time… when the reading public was so large, or so helplessly exposed to the influences of its own time. There never was a time… when those who read at all, read so many more books by living authors than books by dead authors; there never was a time so completely parochial, so shut off from the past…

There was certainly nothing parochial about Eliot’s criticism. The essays in Burnett’s edition treat not only English, American and European writers from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, but ancient writers as well. Indeed, Eliot’s essay, “Virgil and the Chistian World” (1957) is one of the best he ever wrote. “Virgil,” Eliot perceived, “was among all authors of classical antiquity, one for whom the world made sense, for whom it had order and dignity, and for whom, as for no one before his time except the Hebrew prophets, history had meaning. But he was denied the vison of the man [Dante] who could say: ‘Within its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love in one volume, the scattered leaves of the universe.’”

As I shall show, Eliot himself was also denied this vision, even though he longed to make it his own.

II

In many of the essays of the four volumes, Eliot returns again and again to the question of how the Christian reader should treat the writers of his own age, and in this, his counsel has an abiding cogency. “We must remember that the greater part of our current reading matter is written for us by people who have no real belief in a supernatural order,” he remarks, “though some of it may be written by people with individual notions of a supernatural order which are not ours. And the greater part of our reading matter is coming to be written by people who not only have no such belief, but are even ignorant of the fact that there are still people in the world so ‘backward’ or so ‘eccentric’ as to continue to believe.”

If this was true of the literary world of the 1930s, in which anti-Christian Marxism exercised so malign a sway, it is even truer of our world today. To his credit, Eliot had no doubts whatever about the nature of the ersatz religion that still aims to supplant Christianity. “There are a very large number of people in the world today who believe that all ills are fundamentally economic,” he saw clearly enough. “Some believe that various specific economic changes alone would be enough to set the world right; others demand more or less drastic changes in the social order as well… These changes demanded, and in some places carried out, are alike in one respect, that they hold the assumptions of… Secularism: they concern themselves only with changes of a temporal, material, and external nature…” Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Since a good deal of Eliot’s criticism was influenced by Christopher Dawson, who was always intent on emphasizing the primacy of culture in any assessment of the life of religion, Eliot was careful to remind his readers that Christian culture could never be taken for granted. “It is only when we imagine our culture as it ought to be, if our society were a really Christian society,” he wrote, “that we can dare to speak of Christian culture as the highest culture…” Otherwise, we would run the risk, even as Christians, of settling for a culture whose only object would be to protect “the mass of humanity from boredom and despair.” Here, we can see why Eliot regarded Dawson’s views as “nearer to my own, on the whole” as he said in a letter of 1934, “than those of anyone I can think of.” Of course, the realist in Eliot was not unaware that “the period in which we live… may be one of progressive decline of civilization.” But he also recognized that there is “a certain saving egotism… which prevents us from despair as long as we believe that there is anything that we can do which may possibly help to improve matters.” Eliot’s criticism was an attempt “to improve matters” in just this way.

Eliot’s response to his age’s reigning infidelity had a salutary practicality. “So long as we are conscious of the gulf fixed between ourselves and the greater part of contemporary literature, we are more or less protected from being harmed by it, and are in a position to extract from it what good it has to offer us.” Certainly, Eliot practised what he professed by seeing and benefiting from the good that such non-Christian writers as Yeats had to offer. Indeed, the poet critic brought all his Christian acuity to bear in assessing the genuine artist in Yeats. While he admitted that in reading Yeats, “The question of difference, objection and protest arise in the field of doctrine…,” he was fair-minded enough to recognize that Yeats was one of the few poets “whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them.”

About the Irish poet’s celebrated ability to mine old age to prosper his artistic development, Eliot observed: “…towards middle age a man has three choices: to stop writing altogether, to repeat himself with perhaps an increasing skill of virtuosity, or by taking thought to adapt himself to middle age and find a different way of working. When a man is engaged in work of abstract thought – if there is such a thing as wholly abstract thought outside of the mathematical and the physical sciences – his mind can mature, while his emotions either remain the same or atrophy, and it will not matter. But maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one’s age, and with the same intensity as the emotions of youth.”

Eliot, in other words, as he noted in a tribute to Yeats when the poet turned seventy, saw such development in terms of character, not simply genius. In Four Quartets, we can see how the maturing of the whole man in Eliot came with an ascetical honesty that none of his detractors has ever deigned to credit.

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer…

As riveting as this is, it was in Eliot’s general summons to Christian readers that we can see the true utility of the prophetic critic in him. “What I believe to be incumbent upon all Christians is the duty of maintaining consciously certain standards and criteria of criticism over and above those applied by the rest of the world; and that by these criteria and standards everything that we read must be tested.” If we test Eliot himself by “these “criteria and standards,” his critical, as his poetic work, must continue to rank very highly. Yet there is an even more importunate application to Eliot’s summons, for if we accept that “the culture of a people is an incarnation of its religion,” as Eliot argued in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), we have to recognize that Eliot’s own conversion–a conversion from unbelief to Anglo-Catholicism—would never be enough to help him bring about the cultural revival for which he yearned.

After all, as St. John Henry Newman demonstrated so unsparingly in the lectures he gathered together in Anglican Difficulties (1850), lectures Eliot never appeared to have read, Anglo-Catholicism could only be a well-meaning travesty of proper Catholicism. Yes, Christians should set about renewing the culture of Christendom, but this can only be possible within “the one true Fold of the Redeemer,” as Newman referred to the Catholic Church after his conversion. Anything less would leave, as it has left, the renewal Eliot sought incomplete.

III

This does not mean that what Eliot has to say about Shakespeare, the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, the Metaphysical Poets, Milton, John Dryden, Pascal, Samuel Johnson, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, or Swinburne–to name just a few of the writers he takes up in his essays—is not of an exceptionally high critical order. Everything that Eliot says in his critical essays is worth reading. Indeed, in any genuinely Christian culture, the essays would continue to command an honored place, even though Eliot’s own understanding of that culture could never be altogether reliable.

Take, for example, his essay on Arnold. For Newman, “Arnold’s prose writings… about Christianity seem only to say again and again – merely that the Christian faith is of course impossible to the man of culture. They are tediously negative. But they are negative in a peculiar fashion: their aim is to affirm that the emotion of Christianity can and must be preserved without the belief. …The effect of Arnold’s religious campaign is to divorce Religion from thought.”

This is all true, but it is not the entire truth. Arnold can only warm to what he sees as the emotions of Christianity because he has no understanding of the faith’s doctrines and lacking that understanding—especially in an English world hostile to Catholicism—he can only conclude that the doctrines are dispensable. After all, this had been the view of English Christians since the English Reformation. What is it that Charles Greville says in his diaries about the death of that charming English divine Sydney Smith (1771-1845)? “He was full of varied information,” Greville says, “and a liberal, kind-hearted, charitable man.” Yet the diarist has to admit that “I do not suppose he had any dogmatic and doctrinal opinions in respect to religion.” Instead, “he had the true religion of benevolence and charity, of peace and goodwill to man.” Any Catholic would see the same in Arnold in a trice. Why cannot Eliot see it? Eliot cannot see it because it would call into question the doctrinal legitimacy of his Anglo-Catholicism.

What Newman said of the Anglo-Catholics over one hundred and seventy-five years ago is still true. “The time is coming, or is come,” he urged his former Anglo-Catholic friends once he had left the National Church for Catholicism, “when you must act in some way or other for yourselves, unless you would drift to some form of infidelity, or give up principle altogether… The onus probandi will be on your side then. Now you are content to be negative and fragmentary in doctrine; you aim at nothing higher than smart articles in newspapers and magazines, at clever hits, spirited attacks, raillery, satire, skirmishing on posts of your own selecting; fastening on weak points, or what you think so, in Dissenters or Catholics; inventing ingenious retorts, evading dangerous questions; parading this or that isolated doctrine as essential, and praising this or that Catholic practice or Catholic saint, to make up for abuse, and to show your impartiality; and taking all along a high, eclectic, patronising, indifferent tone; this has been for some time past your line, and it will not suffice; it excites no respect, it creates no confidence, it inspires no hope.”

In reading Newman’s response towards the Anglo-Catholic penchant for “parading this or that isolated doctrine as essential,” we are put in mind of the misguided Mere Christianity (1952) of C.S. Lewis, another Protestant whose understanding of Christian doctrine was wobbly, though it has to be said that his English History in the Sixteenth Century (1954) is a superb piece of literary criticism and it would be an odd Christian culture that did not give pride of place to The Screwtape Letters (1941).

Still, Lewis was deeply ambivalent about culture, seeing it simply as something that gave him “an enormous amount of pleasure.” Whether such pleasure made him a better Christian, he could not say. Here, he calls to mind Trollope, who speaks of “many good men, even in these days, who regard the writer of novels as a doer of evil and the reader of novels as one who wastes the time which has been given to us all to be so used that we may become fit for eternity.” At best, literary culture seemed to Lewis “a diversion from guilty pleasure.” After all, as far as he could see, the New Testament was “cold to culture”–it made no case for culture’s importance.

Clearly, if Lewis saw, as Eliot and Dawson saw, that the erosion of Western culture arose from the erosion of Christianity, it did not trouble him. Moreover, although in some respects more learned than Eliot, he bristled at what he saw as the elitism of Eliot’s notions of culture. Indeed, he was grateful for the bad hymnology in the churches he attended because, for him, “it was good that we should have to lay down our precious refinement at the very doorstep of the church.” At the same time, the aesthete in him insisted that “choirs sing well.” Why? “Otherwise, we merely confirm the majority in their conviction that the world of Business, which does with such efficiency so much that never really needed doing, is real. The adult and the practical world and all this ‘culture’ and all this ‘religion’ (horrid words both) are essentially marginal, amateurish and rather effeminate activities.” These were not the musings of a critic convinced that the revival of Christian culture was of any urgency.

Newman’s recognition of Anglo-Catholic views on the suppositious “weak points’ of Catholicism is also striking, calling to mind as it does Eliot’s rejection of the Catholic Church’s ban on contraception. When the Lambeth Conference (1930) sanctioned contraception, which predictably opened the floodgates to abortion, Eliot agreed with the Anglican bishops, choosing to see their sanction as an acknowledgment of what he actually styled “a courageous facing of facts of life.” Surely, no understanding of the sanctity of life as poor as this could have anything to do with reviving true Christian culture.

When Eliot called for the renewal of Christian culture, however inadequately conceived, after the devastation of the Second World War, there was naturally resistance on the part of a world too frazzled by war and war’s aftermath to contemplate so demanding a task. But now, when the West continues to succumb to the most appalling decadence, Eliot’s rallying cry may not sound so untimely. Certainly, there are more grounds than ever for agreeing with the poet that “If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes.” We must simply keep in mind that how we define Christianity in that warning will determine its efficacy.

IV

Yet, we have to remember that the very notion that any critic, even the most Catholic critic, could bring about any genuine revival of Christian culture is rather fanciful. Yes, as Newman pointed out in the Idea of a University (1872), “If the interposition of the Church is necessary in the Schools of Science, still more imperatively is it demanded in the other main constituent portion… of Liberal Education —Literature.” But the “interposition” Newman had in mind is by its very nature limited. For Newman,

Literature stands related to Man as Science stands to Nature; it is his history. Man is composed of body and soul; he thinks and he acts; he has appetites, passions, affections, motives, designs; he has within him the lifelong struggle of duty with inclination; he has an intellect fertile and capacious; he is formed for society, and society multiplies and diversifies in endless combinations his personal characteristics, moral and intellectual. All this constitutes his life; of all this Literature is the expression; so that Literature is to man in some sort what autobiography is to the individual; it is his Life and Remains. Moreover, he is this sentient, intelligent, creative, and operative being, quite independent of any extraordinary aid from Heaven, or any definite religious belief; and as such, as he is in himself, does Literature represent him; it is the Life and Remains of the natural man, innocent or guilty.

In thus defining the limitations of the Church’s “interposition” into the otherwise intractable realm of literature, Newman does not seek to disparage the Church’s influence. “I do not mean to say that it is impossible… that Literature should be tinctured by a religious spirit,” he writes. He cites, for example, Hebrew Literature, which has a definite theological cast. But he does argue that while Literature might be affected by place, period and language, “on the whole, all Literatures are one; they are the voices of the natural man.”

And here we can see why it might be idle to take exception to Eliot for being a Protestant rather than a Catholic advocate of Christian culture, pace the temptation to argue otherwise. After all, as Newman shows, forcing literature into any Procrustean orthodox Christian mold might very well prove an otiose undertaking.

Why? For Newman:

While Nature physical remains fixed in its laws, Nature moral and social has a will of its own, is self-governed, and never remains any long while in that state from which it started into action. Man will never continue in a mere state of innocence; he is sure to sin, and his literature will be the expression of his sin, and this whether he be heathen or Christian. Christianity has thrown gleams of light on him and his literature; but as it has not converted him, but only certain choice specimens of him, so it has not changed the characters of his mind or of his history; his literature is either what it was, or worse than what it was, in proportion as there has been an abuse of knowledge granted and a rejection of truth. On the whole, then, I think it will be found, and ever found, as a matter of course, that Literature, as such, no matter of what nation, is the science or history, partly and at best of the natural man, partly of man in rebellion.

If we accept this reading of matters, we can spare ourselves the bother of worrying whether Eliot is a proper proponent of Christian culture and simply welcome the efforts he made–mostly good efforts–to prosper that culture in our midst that squares with Christian convictions. With respect to that literature that cannot be reconciled with such convictions, well, we can always fall back on Newman’s useful aperçu that “Man’s work will savour of man, in his elements and powers excellent and admirable, but prone to disorder and excess, to error and to sin. Such too will be his literature; it will have the beauty and the fierceness, the sweetness and the rankness, of the natural man.” We can also join Newman in recognizing that sacred literature–the Bible, even–which one might reasonably regard as a signal part of Christian culture, can never give us what our secular literature gives us.

Again, in The Idea of a University, Newman is very level-headed about this: “What is a clearer proof of the truth of all this than the structure of the Inspired Word itself,” he asks.

It is undeniably not the reflection or picture of the many, but of the few; it is no picture of life, but an anticipation of death and judgment. Human literature is about all things, grave or gay, painful or pleasant; but the Inspired Word views them only in one aspect, and as they tend to one scope. It gives us little insight into the fertile developments of mind; it has no terms in its vocabulary to express with exactness the intellect and its separate faculties: it knows nothing of genius, fancy, wit, invention, presence of mind, resource. It does not discourse of empire, commerce, enterprise, learning, philosophy, or the fine arts. Slightly too does it touch on the more simple and innocent courses of nature and their reward. Little does it say of those temporal blessings which rest upon our worldly occupations, and make them easy; of the blessings which we derive from the sunshine day and the serene night, from the succession of the seasons, and the produce of the earth. Little about our recreations and our daily domestic comforts; little about the ordinary occasions of festivity and mirth, which sweeten human life; and nothing at all about various pursuits or amusements, which it would be going too much into detail to mention. We read indeed of the feast when Isaac was weaned, and of Jacob’s courtship, and of the religious merry-makings of holy Job; but exceptions, such as these, do but remind us what might be in Scripture, and is not. If then by Literature is meant the manifestation of human nature in human language, you will seek for it in vain except in the world. Put up with it, as it is, or do not pretend to cultivate it; take things as they are, not as you could wish them.

Certainly. Eliot followed this sage counsel in taking Yeats and Arnold as he found them, whatever their Christian deficiencies; and we might be well-advised to do the same with regard to Eliot himself, irrespective of whether we agree with his Anglo-Catholicism.

As for Burnett’s 4-volume edition of the essays, there is much to deplore and little to recommend. The edition has no index; it is printed on flimsy paper; and its print quality is often so faint as to be illegible. It omits whole bits of the author’s text in “Religion and Literature,” the essay on which so much of the present essay has drawn. What can one say? Shame on Faber and shame on Archie Burnett, who did such a good job with A.E. Housman’s letters for Oxford. Together, they have produced a drab, slapdash, disappointing edition, even though its relative affordability will at least have the virtue of being accessible to the penurious young. Readers keen on discovering the true riches of Eliot’s prose should get hold of Ronald Schuchard’s costlier but far superior edition, the annotations and index of which abundantly exhibit not only the range but the unity of the poet’s splendid criticism.

Collected Prose of T.S. Eliot (4 volumes)
Volume 1: 1905-1928, 600 pages
Volume 2: 1929-1934, 904 pages
Volume 3: 1939-1950, 880 pages
Volume 4: 1951-1966, 856 pages
Edited by Archie Burnett
Faber & Faber, 2024
Hardcover