| Chapter 1: | Eliot and Shelley: Influence, Renunciation, and Accommodation |
|
|
(Woolf, Letters, 233) Although brought up in a Unitarian household, Eliot had gradually moved away from the belief of his parents as his education introduced him to a wider spectrum of thought, coming, by the time he was studying anthropology at Harvard, to see religion as a failed attempt to answer the questions and attendant anxieties of the modern age. With The Waste Land, he had set down in poetry a culture in decline at all levels, its people finding in the hollow words of old ritual no trace of personal release or purpose while the symbols of religious culture fall into decay—the empty chapel, the unregenerate dry bones, the Biblical wilderness waiting in vain for the restorative rains. It was the vision of a man in crisis, close to collapse as a result of the stifling routine of a bank clerk’s existence, and a marriage that had been unhappy almost from the start. Now, in two short ceremonies, the man who had created what many saw as the modern world’s most despairing vision was admitted to the fellowship that promised eternal rest for those who accepted it and threatened eternal damnation for those who did not adhere to its message.5
If there is a particular aspect of Eliot’s brand of Christianity that should be stressed at this point in his life, it is its indebtedness to strong concepts of sin, repentance, and judgement. Writing to William Force Stead after Easter 1928 and reflecting on the route he felt his faith required at its early stage, he expressed his conviction that “nothing could be too ascetic, too violent, for my own needs.” (Cited in Schuchard, Ange, 157) In its first manifestation, Eliot’s Christian faith was concerned with the repudiation of sin and the attachments that had made sin possible. To move forward in faith meant acknowledging that one’s life had, up to that point, been one of error, of wrong decisions, and acts committed for the wrong motives. The language of his late work, Four Quartets, is suffused with the sense that the religious experience necessitates acknowledgement of past transgressions before spiritual progress is possible. In ‘East Coker’, he writes that every moment may be “a new and shocking / Valuation of all we have been”, and this need to see the folly of past actions en route to forgiveness is given voice by the “compound ghost” met in ‘Little Gidding’, who will be examined in greater detail later in this study.