journal of undergraduate research
MOLLY KRING is a senior English and Sociology major. Her interest
in the intersection of religion and modernity began when she read
classic sociological theory on the changing role of religion in modern capitalist societies and later while conducting research with Dr.
Christian Smith on the subject. The fact that secularization was not
occurring at the level predicted (if at all) by sociologists led her to
take a class with her thesis advisor, Romana Huk, entitled “The idea
of ‘God’ in Postmodern Poetry.” After graduation, Molly will work
for the government and later hopes to teach English. She would
like to thank her parents for their neverending support and Romana
Huk for her direction.
138
journal of undergraduate research
Purifying Words to Revive Images:
Sensory Intimations of God in Eliot’s
“Four Quartets”
MOLLY KRING
“Purifying Words to Revive Images” explores how T.S. Eliot
draws on Eastern religious practices to approach a God beyond logic
without once mentioning his name. Upon Wittgenstein’s declaration that human language cannot touch the divine and Nietzsche’s
pronouncement that God is dead, a gap opened between the logical
and the spiritual. Talk of God largely left the academic scene and the
written word was left to only hint at the divine, for words, as human-constructed forms, were deemed necessarily inadequate for the
communication of God. Eliot addresses this issue by unintentionally
aligning himself with a neo-Thomist position where he engages the
spiritual by circumventing the problem of language altogether. By
employing musical forms and Zen-like sensory images, the words
on the page become transubstantiated and transcend their potential
limitations to intimate feelings of the divine.
1 39
When Nietzsche famously proclaimed that God is dead, and Wittgenstein followed with
the declaration, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,” talk of God was
largely relegated to theological studies. 1 Influenced by the French Symbolist literary
movement—especially Mallarmé, who emphasized the sound of each word in poems and left the
meaning intentionally ambiguous—T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets broke this silence. Eliot realized,
as Wittgenstein did, that language is inevitably limited because the divine is necessarily greater
than any human ideas and constructions. He therefore circumvents the problem of language
proposed by Wittgenstein by going beyond the literal denotations of words to their sensory
capabilities to communicate meanings that are not explicitly written. Eliot turns from words to
music, emphasizing the auditory quality of his poetry and speaking through the unspoken cracks
between paradoxical images. In Four Quartets, Eliot draws on the mystical tradition of
communicating God without once mentioning the name “God.” By doing so, he unintentionally
aligns himself with neo-Thomist thought—in particular with Jacques Maritain’s model of the
soul—to intimate an idea of God by engaging the mind, spirit and senses. This holistic approach
to religious poetry resists classification and denotation, as two-thirds of its content goes beyond
the rational sphere of human understanding. Because of the ambiguity and bursts of sensory
experience that result from communicating God outside of logic, contemporary theologian David
Tracy convincingly argues that the quartets function similarly to Zen koans, puzzles in the Zen
Buddhist tradition that seek to communicate God outside human logic. Both discover God
outside human constructions without reducing His vast complexity and ambiguity merely to
language.
The simplicity of Eliot’s language, however, has led literary critic Shira Wolosky to term
Eliot a “linguistic ascetic” who is part of the apophatic tradition. 2 This tradition renounces any
1
positive ideas of God and instead defines God in terms of what He is not. Such a reading
overlooks the fact that so much of the poem’s meaning lies between or beyond its literal content.
When the neo-Thomist features of Eliot’s work are taken into account, his poetry becomes quite
clearly cataphatic, meaning that it expresses God through positive terminology. Four Quartets
builds up images through sensory language and raises paradoxes whose meaning goes beyond
the mere words on the page.
Moreover, the way in which previously stated images return in the final stanza of Little
Gidding to create a new spiritual whole where “the fire and rose are one” challenges Wolosky’s
claim that Eliot is doing away with excess language to achieve a concise, purified meaning. Eliot
is indeed paring down words, but in doing so he builds up sensory images that evoke feelings of
the divine not present in the words themselves. A formal analysis will show Eliot’s apophatic
tendencies, but this analysis misses the felt images that his words evoke; the spiritual feelings are
part of the poem even though they are not in Eliot’s actual words. The words combine to create
these divine moments, but the moments cannot be pinned down to any single word. Unlike an
apophatic writer who defines God in terms of what He is not, Eliot cycles through experiences
and arrives where he started with a new spiritual wisdom, and an image of God. He strips down
his language to build up a new model of God. Four Quartets therefore exemplifies the
transposition of neo-Thomist thought onto Eliot’s poetics and consequently falls into the
cataphatic tradition, for Eliot’s poetry, like the Zen koan, builds up spare images that point
toward God through both the intellect and senses.
2
I. The Death of Religion
In Hebrew, there is no word for religion. Before modernity there was never a reason to
separate religious experience from any other part of life to the Hebrews. Knowing via mystical
experience was just as valid as knowing via logic. It was only with the birth of the Enlightenment
that God began to die and a gap opened between the religious and the secular; our tight hold on
the movement’s proclamation that reason is the only real, true thing in this world meant that God
was eventually subjected to the same logical scrutiny that was applied to everything as a test of
its validity. As John Caputo notes, the modern world has dramatically redefined “God”:
Instead of beginning on our knees, we are all seated solemnly and with stern faces on the
hard benches of the court of Reason as it is called into session. God is brought before
the court, like a defendant with His hat in his hand, and required to give an account of
Himself, to show His ontological papers, if He expects to win the court’s approval. In
such a world, from Anselm’s point of view, God is already dead, even if you conclude
that the proof is valid, because whatever you think you have proven or disproven is not
the God he experiences in prayer and liturgy but a philosophical idol. 3
In our modern minds, we are on a mission to root out that which is not “real,” drawing lines
between the real and the imaginary, the true and the false, the believer and the non-believer. We
live in a world of binaries, where emotion is barred from the academic sphere for fear that it
cannot be proven, codified, or objectified. In such a world, the modern sense of isolation and
alienation is rampant, as evidenced in Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” “Waking alone / At the hour
when we are / Trembling with tenderness / Lips that would kiss / Form prayers to broken stone”
(47-50). The repetition of the eerie chant in the last lines of the poem bolsters this sense of
hopelessness: “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” (94-98). In a world that validates only reason,
Eliot sees us as hollow, dead beings, for all our vitality is deemed subjective, unreal, and
therefore, unacceptable.
3
Ideas of God garner no respect in a world that only views truth as that which can be
logically proven. All personal experiences of the divine become just that—personal events that
must be dealt with in the privacy of churches and homes. Eliot’s poetry was also heavily
influenced by his having lived through the two World Wars. The observation that the world
seemingly progressing in its rational thinking could commit atrocities so horrific exacerbated
Eliot’s feelings of hopelessness. The exclusion of God from all serious academic discussions had
not led to progress, but rather destruction. It is out of the rubble of these wars and the
Enlightenment period that Eliot writes of a God that is beyond our rational thinking and
language.
Eliot thus closes the perceived gap between the religious and secular, objectivity and
subjectivity, the mystical and the real, that he believed had never really existed. Caputo agrees
that the “crisis of faith” in the post-Enlightenment era never really was a crisis at all. He states,
“Religion was reported missing mostly by the intellectuals; no one outside the academy thought
that it had gone anywhere at all” 4 and that “in making these discriminations [between the real
and the imaginary, the religious and the secular], [the intellectuals] made or invented the very
categories they were discriminating, none of which had existed, and certainly not in these precise
terms, before modernity.” 5
Eliot’s challenge in communicating “God” is complicated by the fact that the language he
employs creates the gap in the first place. By Anselm’s definition, God is inaccessible to the
human mind; He is “a being than which nothing greater can be conceived.” 6 He therefore also
lies outside the human language. John MacQuarrie lays out the problem when he asks, “How can
we talk meaningfully of God in a language that is tied to finite experience?” 7 Wittgenstein’s
4
writings respond to these questions and conclude that any theological talk of God must be
silenced, since God can only be revealed to us, not spoken of:
What Wittgenstein objects to, then, is a certain human tendency to extend beyond our
limits, and to talk of things about which we should rightfully be silent and respectful. The
Tractatus can thus be read as a modern via negativa. The picture theory of meaning, with
its resultant banishment of theology to silence, is designed to protect “what is higher”
from the perverting, all-too-human encroaches of language. It is not philistinism, then,
that informs Wittgenstein’s silence. No, just as Kant famously “found it necessary to
deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith,” so the Tractatus sets a limit to what
can be spoken (and therefore thought) in order to respect the awesome power of the
mystical. 8
Eliot realizes, as did the Existentialist school of philosophers, that “[w]hat we as finite creatures
know is known through our finitude. Hence what we can know and say about God is always
symbolic, that is, consists of statements that point beyond themselves.” 9 Our language can only
circle around the idea of God, never communicate His essence. Therefore, Eliot moves outside of
language and communicates God through our senses, thereby circumventing the problem of
language entirely.
In an essay entitled “Hamlet and His Problems,” Eliot writes that poetic expression is
best conveyed through an “objective correlative,” i.e. a “set of objects, a situation, a chain of
events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts,
which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” 10
Such a correlative can be seen in “Little Gidding” when Eliot writes, “The voice of the hidden
waterfall / And the children in the apple-tree / Not known, because not looked for / But heard,
half-heard, in the stillness / Between two waves of the sea” (250-254). The poet’s invocation of
these images—a waterfall, children playing in an apple tree, and waves in the sea—evokes a
feeling of nostalgia for innocence and lost time, a feeling of calm in relation to the sea, and the
gentleness of words echoing through time (“half heard, in the stillness / Between two waves of
5
the sea”). Communication has transcended the realm of the rational where words communicate a
logically progressive narrative. The verse has moved towards generating an inexplicable feeling
of the divine experience. David Perkins agrees that Eliot intentionally aims for ambiguity when
he notes that “[s]pecific lines and passages activate the semantic suggestions and emotional
overtones of words while precluding determinate meaning.” 11 Such is the case in the
aforementioned passage.
Moreover, the first word in every line of Four Quartets is capitalized, producing the
effect of distinct individual thoughts forming a sensuous, musical whole. Each line creates a
discrete image that is connected to that before it and after it, but wholly its own experience. To
use the previously quoted passage from “Little Gidding,” it is not clear how “The voice of the
hidden waterfall” is connected to the following line, “And the children in the apple-tree,” but
Eliot’s use of a conjunction here links the two distinct thoughts. Moreover, the next line, “Not
known, because not looked for,” refers to both of the previous lines, once again establishing a
link between seemingly disconnected thoughts. The reader is left asking, “What is not looked
for?” Similarly, the line “But heard, half-heard, in the stillness” is itself poetic and when
followed by “Between two waves of the sea,” we connect the children playing in the apple tree
and the hidden waterfall as being experiences contained in this image of two waves in the sea.
While the connection between the thoughts is not logically clear, the distinct, yet conjoined
phrases create a feeling of calm, childhood innocence. Comprised of these objective correlatives,
the poem engenders a flood of sensory experience that cannot be paraphrased, but only felt. The
meaning of the poem is found in the reader’s reaction to these combinations of words, not in the
narrative Eliot weaves, for there is no logical “plot” to the poem. Aiding this sensory experience
6
are not only the objective correlatives, but the individual words of which they consist. Within
Eliot’s poetry, language itself is both an end and a beginning.
Eliot circumvents the limiting power that Wittgenstein saw in traditional words by
employing mantras. Central to the Buddhist tradition, mantras render his poetics sensuous. They
extricate from conventional language meanings that are unbound by the limits of its artificiality.
Mantras are chosen in Buddhist meditation for their sound, not for their meaning. In “The
Wasteland,” Eliot ends the 433-line poem with “Shantih shantih shantih” (433). Before this
point, the poem presents different speakers whose connection to each other is unclear. The reader
is left feeling lost in a crowd of competing voices, unsure which way is forward. The multitude
of sources that Eliot draws on reinforces this effect of displacement; a glance at his extensive
footnotes to “The Wasteland” demonstrates this.
That Eliot chooses to end a poem of fragments with a meditative mantra in a foreign
language is therefore of some significance. It combines all the fragmentary elements previously
appearing in the poem and condenses them into one sound. Eliot does not seek to explain the
poem, but rather to point to a meaning beyond the words, in the auditory quality of “shantih.”
The poem is thus elevated to the realm of the mystical, refusing to resolve confusion and
paradoxes raised in earlier parts of the poem. By using mantras and incorporating unique sounds
into his poetry, Eliot extirpates poetry from the realm of rationality and makes the act of reading
a sensory experience, one that is free from the limits of language proposed by Wittgenstein.
Moreover, by leaving behind English words whose familiar connotations and denotations would
prevent the reader from appreciating the auditory quality of the word itself, Eliot is able to hone
in on an idea of God outside familiar linguistic constructions. His use of mantra-like words and
phrases speaks to this transcendence of language so that the words themselves become
7
transubstantiated; in face of Wittgenstein’s declaration, “The limits of my language mean the
limits of my world,” Eliot establishes a new beginning in a different sphere of knowing but
contradictorily uses language to take the reader there. 12
In doing so, Eliot takes part in the contemporaneous neo-Thomistic retrievals of the
sensory in academic thought. The notion of sensory knowledge merging with rational thinking to
find Truth is elucidated by prominent Neo-Thomist thinker Jacques Maritain in his essay
“Creative Intuition and Poetic Knowledge” where he argues for a tri-fold model of knowing. In
the “quest for being,” he writes that the mind passes through three stages: scientific knowledge,
metaphysical knowledge, and supra-rational knowledge, which is the knowledge through
mystical experience. 13 Maritain uses a diagram of three cones stacked on top of each other, the
bottom being sensation, the middle imagination, and the top, reason. At the tip of the cone lies
the soul. Because all three areas touch the soul, it follows that to communicate feelings of the
soul, the poet must engage all three faculties. Maritain writes:
Poetry is the fruit neither of the intellect alone, nor of imagination alone. Nay more,
it proceeds from the totality of man, sense, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and
spirit together. And the first obligation imposed on the poet is to consent to be brought
back to the hidden place, near the center of the soul, where this totality exists in the state
of a creative source. 14
And this is precisely what Eliot’s poetry does. The ideas of time and love put forth in Four
Quartets appeal to Reason—perhaps this is why Eliot’s poetry remains so quotable today. Such
famous lines as “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be
to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” posit philosophical ideas of
time and experience, possibly influenced by Eliot’s dissertation on philosopher Josiah Royce
(241-243). His emphasis on fantastical experiences (the rose garden, children playing in apple
trees, waterfalls) engages the spirit through images that transcend beyond reality to render a
8
dream-like world where God is present (the rose garden is an allusion to the Garden of Eden).
The images of children frolicking in apple trees and voices hiding in waterfalls are not earthly
ones, but belong to a storybook where human pain and suffering are absent. His use of words for
their sounds and meditative properties, and employment of vivid imagery engages the senses. In
the case of Eliot, then, poetry engages the totality of our human faculties and recognizes the
impossibility of separating the mind from the spirit. While Maritain’s soul and Eliot’s God are
not the same, both men seek to communicate ideas outside of human rationality, and recognize
the need for the three-pronged approach to do so. Just as Maritain sees the unconscious as
composed of our intellect, senses and imagination, so Eliot believes that to apprehend God, a
being necessarily beyond our language, poetry must combine sensory experience with rational
thought.
II. The Transubstantiation of Words into Music
The sensory aspect of Four Quartets is most pervasive in the musical structure of the
poem. Influenced by Mallarmé and the French Symbolist movement’s embrace of music as a
means to communicate most purely, Eliot adopts this sense into his own poetry, as the title of
Four Quartets suggests. Of his philosophy of poetry, Mallarmé writes, “Poetry is the expression,
by means of human language brought back to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious sense of
existence: thus it endows our stay on earth with authenticity and constitutes the only spiritual
task.” 15 This notion that music could elevate poetry to the level of the spiritual especially
appealed to Eliot, as his mission in writing Four Quartets was undeniably religious. Four
Quartets could easily be described as a spiritual journey, one that goes through discrete
experiences to create a harmonizing end where the “fire and the rose are one” (261). Music, then,
9
acts as a medium through which the evocations of his words are transubstantiated from that of an
earthly essence to the spiritual. Sounds, he believed, allowed the poet to communicate ideas that
the limiting human language could not touch. In the introduction to Valery’s The Art of Poetry,
Eliot writes, “Music itself may be conceived as striving towards an unattainable timelessness.” 16
While words are inevitably tied to historical connotations that cause their meaning to potentially
change, music allows the artist to evoke the same feeling in different eras. Eliot describes the
way in which a poem’s structure can transport words from the realm of the real to that of the
supernatural:
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness. 17
The “silence” he speaks of is perhaps that which Wittgenstein declared must be employed when
addressing spiritual concerns and the “stillness” is the idea of God in a harmonizing whole that
his poetry strives for. Eliot uses Music extensively in his poetry because it can communicate
what words cannot.
Eliot writes the entire Four Quartets as a musical composition. As the title suggests, the
poem is divided into four quartets, each with its own character and musicality. Musically, a
quartet is characterized by four different instruments with four different parts—traditionally the
violin, viola, cello and bass—coming together to create a single musical composition. Similarly,
Four Quartets consists of four separate tunes, represented in the four elements of air, earth, fire
and water. Unifying each of these sections (“East Coker,” “Burnt Norton,” “Dry Salvages,” and
“Little Gidding”) is the rhythm of the poet’s language. Each quartet is characterized by a strict
10
rhyming scheme within five-stress lines. Furthermore, the last quartet, “Little Gidding,” finds
traces of the three previous quartets. Mirroring a traditional musical quartet, each part
interweaves with the others to create a unifying whole. In the last stanza, the poet harkens to “the
hidden laughter / Of children in the foliage” in “Burnt Norton,” the “whisper of running streams,
and winter lightning” in “East Coker,” and the “music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at
all” from “Dry Salvages.” Just as a symphonic quartet would end on a harmonizing note, so also
do Four Quartets, when “the fire and the rose are one” (261). The musical quality of Four
Quartets thus creates a unity from discrete sound elements and causes the reader to leave the
poem with emotions, not necessarily codified ideas. In this form, words become music notes and
draw upon the reader’s emotions, just as a string quartet would.
III. Raising Paradoxes
Eliot’s use of juxtaposed, paradoxical images further detaches the words of his poetry
from their denotative meanings and communicates ideas that are inexpressible solely with words.
In fact, the entire first quartet of Four Quartets is marked by contradiction. The phrases
“Midwinter spring” and “frost and fire,” lay the ground of contradiction for the poem that
follows (1,4); also notable is the destructive yet simultaneously purifying power of fire. As the
quartets progress, however, these contradictions are drawn closer together to eventually form a
final resolution in the image of the fire of the rose, echoing the aforementioned musical structure
of the poem. Eliot ends Four Quartets with the words, “And the fire and the rose are one,”
representing the Buddhist and Christian traditions merging at the end of the journey (i.e. the end
of life) (261). The rose represents the lotus flower that is a prevalent symbol in the Buddhist
tradition and the fire symbolizes the Christian Holy Spirit. By connecting the two religions’
11
dominant symbols, Eliot seeks to merge the rational Western and intentionally ambiguous
Eastern thoughts.
Eliot’s use of paradoxes to illustrate God harkens to Simone Weil’s notion of finding
truth in contradiction. Arguing that contradiction is necessary to all Truth, she writes, “The
contradictions the mind comes up against—these are the only realities: they are the criterion of
the real.” 18 In fact, Weil argues that to resolve these contradictions is to lose the real. Like Weil,
Eliot writes that the meaning is found between the images and can only be communicated in
paradox:
The poet may juxtapose incompatible images so that the mind will not rest on any
single one, but see through all of them to what lies beyond; in somewhat familiar fashion
words may be detached from their normal referents and have their senses modified by
their relationships with those which surround them. Mallarmé uses the analogy of
music, which can suggest without tying the mind to irrelevant peculiarities, and Symons
echoes him in describing his best poetry: “every word is a jewel...every image is a
symbol, and the whole poem is visible music.” 19
Eliot’s cyclical notion of time, a concept Eliot partially borrows from Hinduism, suggests
that there is no past, present, or future, but all time is eternally present. Our lives move through a
cycle and return to previously occupied points at which time we gain wisdom. If we read this
final passage with this notion of cyclical time in mind, the reader is forced to view the paradoxes
as two points on a connected circle. God, then, is found in-between the words and paradoxes
themselves. He is the irreducible experience, the being towards which the mantras point, and that
which cannot be described. That Eliot ends the poem with an image of paradox (“And the fire
and the rose are one”) is a sign that he does not seek to merge the contradictory images, but find
truth in the paradox itself, in the very fact that paradox is necessary and the contradiction cannot
be resolved. Far from a freedom from uncertainty, it is this very uncertainty in paradox that
creates spiritual freedom and unity for Eliot.
12
The initial confusion ensuing from these paradoxes causes David Tracy to draw parallels
between Four Quartets and Zen koans. In the Zen tradition, koans are seemingly nonsensical
stories, questions, or statements that are meant to be inaccessible to rational understanding,
comprehensible only through intuition. Their purpose is to shock the mind into awareness and
break the habit of rational thought. One famous koan asks, “Two hands clap and there is a sound;
what is the sound of one hand?” Similarly, in Eliot’s poetry, the paradoxes force us to focus on
the poem’s auditory and visual qualities, as logically, there is little to be explained. Connotations
and definitions are left behind for the very essence of each word as it is spoken out loud. While I
do not argue that Eliot’s poetry can be called “nonsensical,” I do think the Quartets obfuscate an
understanding of a rational story within the poetry.
Eliot’s tendency to raise discrete images in each line without always explaining their
interconnectedness also parallels Zen koans’ goal to avoid denotation. David Perkins writes that
“Eliot impedes denotation by verbal contradiction, vagueness, ambiguousness, failure of logical
sequence, and paradox.” 20 And in fact, Thomas Merton describes Zen in similar language: “The
whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct
grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.” 21 Zen is an “awareness of the
ontological ground of our own being here and now, right in the midst of the world.” 22 Just as
Buddhism “does not seek primarily to understand or to ‘believe in’ the enlightenment of Buddha
as the solution to all human problems, but seeks an existential and empirical participation in that
enlightenment experience,” so also I argue that Eliot’s goal is to bring the reader back to the
ground of sensory experience. This ground is the base of the unconscious for Maritain. 23
Zen is purposefully meant to be incommunicable through language, as rationality cannot
explain the presence of God. The goal, rather, is to communicate the divine by bringing the
13
reader back “to the pure unarticulated and unexplained ground of direct experience,” an idea
which has Heideggerian undertones. 24 Zen is not a revelation like Christianity; it is not an
experience communicated, but the experience of being itself. As mentioned earlier, Eliot presents
vignettes of experiences in the quartets that are not meant to be part of any overarching narrative.
They are rather examples of what he termed “objective correlatives,” images meant to evoke a
certain emotion. Tracy agrees:
Such close attention [in Four Quartets] to the fragments of meaning become like the nosense, not-nonsense, of the great Zen Koans. Any careful reading, like Eliot’s own in his
recording, can render problematic any commonsense or ontological, perhaps more
exactly, onto-theological categories by destabilizing all Western ideas… [t]he syntax of
The Quartets, more subtly but just as insistently as the syntax of “The Wasteland,”
continually breaks down and renders ambiguous and polyvalent, perhaps even overdetermined, the subject, verb, object pattern by which the English language is usually
spoken. 25
Eliot and Zen seek similar ends, but I argue that koans are far more explicit in their mission to
avoid logical constructions. The objective correlatives that compose the quartets present definite
images, but the reader is able to tell what the correlatives represent; koans, on the other hand,
usually sound completely absurd. Eliot engages the rational part of Maritain’s conception of the
unconscious along with the sensory, whereas koans avoid logic completely. Therefore, the
crossover between Zen koans and Eliot’s poetry lies in their wish to go beyond the realms of
language to communicate a complex divine presence.
Eliot’s Four Quartets also bear a striking resemblance to Murray’s description of
meditation. He writes that meditation is “aided by the senses, the memory and the imagination...
In the act of contemplation, however, such vision comes, as it were, more intuitively, and
without a laboured process of reasoning.” 26 As argued earlier, Eliot’s objective correlatives are
meant to evoke feelings, not necessarily reasoned ideas, and his use of mantras insists that the
reader meditate upon the words themselves. However, the philosophical ideas of time in the
14
quartets do require a “labored process of reasoning.” Eliot invites the reader to meditate on his
poetry and ideas, to feel the emotions his objective correlatives evoke and reason to the same
wisdom he arrives at. Similarly, Murray argues that Four Quartets acts as a meditative tool that
allows the reader to experience the divine:
The dialectical process of statement and counter-statement in the poem, the discovery
together, for example, of intense intellectual concentration with more than usual
emotional distraction, the placing side by side of the abstract and the concrete, of the
dogmatic and the exploratory, and the continual lively attempt to subordinate one faculty
to the other — finds a most illuminating and close parallel not only in the art of music but
also in the traditional practice and art of meditation and meditative poetry. 27
Kearns notes in T.S. Eliot and Indic Traditions that Eliot had definite links to the practice
of meditation. In 1921, Dr. Roger Vittoz formally trained the poet in the art of meditation. Vittoz
himself was well-known for combining meditative “training with a living example of personal
austerity, Christian practice, and Catholic faith that made him, for many, a kind of living saint,”
making him a role model for Eliot. 28 Kearns argues that Vittoz’s lessons made a mark upon
Eliot’s poetry. She writes that “we hear an echo both of Vittoz’s simplifiez-vous and of his
technique of concentration on a single word when Eliot speaks of a ‘condition of complete
simplicity’ in which ‘the fire and the rose are one.’” 29 Vittoz instructed his patients to use the
word “one” as “a mantra-like point of concentration in order to calm the mind. 30 Like the last
lines of “The Wasteland,” Eliot ends Four Quartets with a mantra and therefore draws parallels
between his work and meditative practices. Because Eliot’s connection to Indic thought and
meditative practices are quite well-established, it is not surprising that we see echoes of it in his
poetry.
All of Eliot’s techniques thus far discussed—namely, objective correlatives, music and
paradox—establish Four Quartets as a work that engages faculties outside the realm of logic;
however, they tell little of Eliot’s personal theology. I argue that Eliot’s personal theology can be
15
considered cataphatic. Eliot’s notion of time as cyclical is essential to holding this position. The
circular nature of the quartets themselves and Eliot’s belief in time as eternally present prevents a
wholly cataphatic reading of his text because in cyclical time, nothing is ever lost or forgotten,
but rather constantly returned to. Interwoven throughout the quartets is Eliot’s insistence that
ends are beginnings, in reference to both language and time. He writes, “What we call the
beginning is often the end /And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we
start from” (216-218) and “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future /
And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable”
(1-5). Just as the fire in “Little Gidding” is both destructive and purifying, so language kills God
and then reincarnates him in Eliot’s poetry.
Bergsten argues that the progression of the poem itself mirrors this move from rational,
linear thinking and conceptions of time to one where the end is the beginning and returns are
constant. He writes, “Eliot attempts to move from the ‘Midwinter spring’ of the opening stanza
to the ‘unimaginable Zero summer,’ a season when life is apprehended not as movement or
decay but as a perpetual pattern of rebirth and renewal.” 31 Moreover, Eliot’s second quartet,
“East Coker” opens with the line, “Midwinter spring is its own season” (1). Starting the poem at
the midway point between two equinoxes, a turning point in time, is indicative of Eliot’s desire
to complicate the notions of an end and beginning, for to him, they are identical. Linked to the
Hindu notion of time as a cycle, a constant train of death and rebirth, Eliot’s time is neither linear
nor able to be located at any one moment. Eliot sees time through an Indic lens: it is cyclical,
meaning that we are never solely in the past, present, or future, but always on the path of arrival
and departure. Even the poem itself ends where it begins, in the rose garden. Under these
temporal constructions, Eliot suggests that all of our experiences are present at all times: time
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past is both time future and time present. In the progression of life, therefore, nothing is lost,
only re-arrived at and re-figured into bits of wisdom.
Eliot believes that it is upon the returns to previously occupied moments that we find
wisdom. At several points throughout the poem, Eliot’s voice comes through the poetry and he
makes definitive statements about the nature of humanity. In “Little Gidding,” Eliot definitively
states, “Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age,” “Who then devised the torment? Love.” and
“The end is where we start from” (134, 218, 230). In the first, Eliot deems himself the provider
of universal wisdom; in the second, he poses and answers his own question, positioning himself
once again as an authority on matters of Truth; and in the third, he gives us a piece of his own
wisdom. Such instances are examples of what A.D. Moody has termed as Eliot’s “wisdom
mode.” 32 Kearns writes that “Eliot intends ‘Four Quartets’ as wisdom poetry, participating in
that ‘wisdom we can all accept,’ quite apart from any ‘ideas’ we may find in it or to which we
must assent.” 33 In fact, Eliot universalizes his spiritual ideas in a few instances. He writes in
“Little Gidding,” for example, that “If you came this way, / Taking any route, starting from
anywhere, / At any time or at any season, / It would always be the same” (41-44). The poet
argues that all experiences, for all people, communicate the same truths. Eliot notes that while
the experience must be individually felt, the universal wisdom accumulated through one’s life
can be communicated to others: “And the wisdom which we shall have acquired will not be part
of the argument which brings us to the conclusion; it is part of the book but is written in pencil
on the fly-leaf.” 34
Harkening back to Maritain’s model, the senses and the imagination compose two-thirds
of the soul, but these parts can only be felt (for Eliot, by using musical poetry to engage the
senses), whereas only reason can be communicated. Eliot’s wisdom voice follows the images he
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invokes, for the wisdom must come after all has been experienced. To arrive at this wisdom, the
ultimate goal for Eliot, one must pass through all of the experiences that came before it, just as
his most extensive wisdom is found in “Little Gidding,” the end of his poem. This arrival at
wisdom undermines Wolosky’s argument that Eliot is a mystical ascetic who jettisons all
attachments to arrive at an idea of God. 35 Eliot in fact relies on the images throughout the
quartets: he re-evaluates them in his poetry, constantly finding new meaning in that which
preceded him. Without these experiences, he may attain no wisdom.
The final stanza of the final quartet, “Little Gidding,” is meant to signal the end of the
spiritual journey and foreshadows the spiritual unity that arises from the paradoxes raised in the
earlier quartets. Just as Four Quartets ends on the convergence of the fire and the rose, Eliot
suggests that our own spiritual journeys will arrive there as well, despite our varied starting
points. Bergsten writes that “[t]he last paragraph of the last of the ‘Four Quartets’ is clearly
devised as a ‘musical’ finale, in which are gathered the symbols that have recurred throughout
the whole sequence of poems” (164). The last stanza references images from the past three
quartets, resulting in a final image of unity. The only new image in this paragraph, Bergsten
argues, is “‘the crowned knot of fire.’” 36 This snowballing of previous images to create a new
picture of unity is symbolic of Eliot’s notion that we return to the same points with new wisdom
and “know the place for the first time” (257). Out of the fragmented pieces of experience is
revealed a unified whole that embraces contradiction and a singular Truth.
Without the death of the elements (earth, air, fire and water), the death of the poem itself,
and the use of human constructions to communicate God, this unified whole would not be
possible. Union of the four elements is achieved only through their deaths. The poet
systematically announces the death of each, writing, “This is the death of air,” earth, fire, and
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water after three separate stanzas (63, 71, 79). It is at their deaths that they will cease to be
separate contradictory entities, but rather small parts of the same Truth found between the fire
and the rose. Such deaths have ties to the apophatic mystical tradition, in that the elements must
die in order for the reader to grasp at the essential being of the poem, or the unity achieved in the
last stanza. Eliot’s systematic killing of each element is symbolic of his purification of an idea of
God: like apophatic writers, he is telling the reader what God is not. He is not in the air, earth,
fire or water, but rather in “the fire and the rose,” the new image Eliot arrives at once he has
pared down all the experiences he has cycled through in the quartets. Because each quartet
represents one of the four elements, the death of each symbolizes the final death of our human
experiences and a point where they all will come together to form a new whole. The element of
fire in “Little Giddy” is therefore significant: Eliot takes all the wisdom gained in the previous
quartets and uses the purifying fire of the Holy Spirit to arrive at his final image that constitutes
the last line of Four Quartets.
Wolosky argues that Eliot is undeniably an apophatic writer who draws on mystic
traditions: “Eliot’s negative way, that is, follows John’s [St. John of the Cross] particularly in its
ascetic emphasis, its concern with the mystical purgation of the self as an ascetic approach to
ultimate things.” 37 And in fact, lines in Four Quartets, such as “You must go by the way of
dispossession. / In order to arrive at what you are not / You must go through the way in which
you are not,” along with the death of the elements, corroborate Wolosky’s claim that Eliot is, in
fact, drawing on mystical asceticism to illuminate the negative way towards God (East Coker III,
138-43). Troubling to this reading, however, is the presence of reincarnated images in the final
stanza of “Little Gidding”:
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
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Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
(258-274)
Here, Eliot reincarnates images of the previous quartets to create the new image of a “crowned
knot of fire.” That the knot of fire immediately follows the flood of images which came before it
suggests that it is born from their remembrance. The poet has drawn on experiences from
different points on the cycle of time (his life) and has now arrived where he began, but with new
wisdom, evidenced by the “crowned knot of fire.”
The future tense of this passage, however, suggests that this new image will only exist in
the afterlife; here and now, we must merely raise fragments of meaning, bits of wisdom but
never unified truths. Eliot’s use of the phrase “When the tongues of flame are in-folded,”
meaning when the “fire and fire” of line 215 merge, suggests that this moment of unity is yet to
come. The last word of the poem, “one,” lies at the end of this future-oriented stanza, suggesting
that the unity of these fragments will only come once we are free from the constrictions of
human language and mortality. Through these fragments, Eliot suggests that a piecemeal,
paradoxical existence is a prerequisite to any sort of final unification. He is using the
cacophonous and fragmented elements of the poem to illustrate the impossibility of containing
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God within human constructions and the unifying wisdom found in discrete experiences that
resist classification.
Eliot is thus aligning himself with the cataphatic tradition, as he is building up an idea of
God that will manifest its full form in the afterlife. After purifying his experiences, he has
created a new bit of wisdom that contains all that came before it. That the new image is of fire is
not a coincidence. The fire paradox pervades the entire poem, with fire representing both a
destructive and purifying element. Now the two apparently contradictory forces have become
knotted together in a new image that unites the former paradox. This is not an instance of Eliot
illuminating the negative way: he does not say, “This is not God, That is not God,” etc. Instead,
he creates a new image that points towards God. On earth, he suggests, his language must be
restrained and its connotations controlled (leading Wolosky to see him as a linguistic ascetic),
but in the afterlife the false paradoxes written in the quartets will reveal themselves as part of the
same united whole, which the crowned knot of fire hints at in the last stanza.
Moreover, if we accept the parallels between Four Quartets and Zen koans, it becomes
obvious that “linguistic asceticism” does not necessarily equate to apophatic tendencies. Neither
koans nor Eliot’s paradoxes and images attempt to jettison worldly connotations. Rather, as Eliot
states in his definition of an objective correlative, he tightly controls his diction so that the exact
feeling he wishes the reader to experience is evoked. Eliot is conscious of the role his linguistic
asceticism plays in his overall mission. At the end of Four Quartets, he writes that “...every
phrase / And every sentence that is right where every word is at home, / Taking its place to
support the others, / The word neither diffident nor ostentatious” (218-221). The more words
Eliot uses in his poetry, the greater the potential for unwanted connotations attaching to his ideas.
Therefore, Eliot sacrifices word count for image clarity. Eliot’s poetry only seems apophatic
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because of its uncomplicated nature and rejection of elaborate linguistic constructions. Within its
simplicity, however, there is a great complexity, an idea of God that goes beyond the mere
words. The richness of Eliot’s visions is found beyond the paradoxes, within the reader himself.
The sensory and spiritual aspects of his poem, while not visually evident, constitute created
images that Wolosky ignores in her conclusion that Eliot is an apophatic poet.
Thus Eliot is both building up an idea of God and honing in on God; he eliminates that
which God is not (the elements) through a purifying fire, but also reincarnates their respective
images (i.e. the children in the foliage, waterfall and rose garden) that evoke spiritual emotions.
To see him as a linguistic ascetic is to ignore the importance of cyclical time to his poetry; while
a purification and stripping down occurs, it is only one part of the whole circle. The next moment
finds him building up new images, then returning to his “wisdom mode” yet again. Through this
cyclical structure of Four Quartets, Eliot suggests that the only way back to the rose garden
(Eden), is to purify with fire both one’s soul and the words and ideas presented in his poetry.
Words function to strip experiences down to their essential worth and communicate wisdom, but
are not used to build images; this happens with the feelings evoked by the simplicity of his words
in objective correlatives. With this approach, Eliot verges on a sort of divine ignorance; he seeks
to learn all to purify it into a condensed spiritual wisdom, mirroring the author of The Cloud of
Unknowing, a fourteenth-century work Eliot references in the quartets. Thus Eliot can be deemed
a linguistic ascetic, but within a cataphatic tradition, one who approaches God by building
complex images within the simple language of objective correlatives and then stripping down his
experiences to essential wisdom.
Eliot has achieved what Wittgenstein deemed “wordless faith” in the quartets by reaching
at a picture of the divine, but leaving Him unspoken, finding God only in-between the fire and
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the rose. The last stanza of the Quartets points to the world to come, when this paradox will be
united to form Truth, but even Eliot does not attempt to voice what this will be; all he can do is
intimate the divine via his communication of individual experiences through musical language.
Such an approach epitomizes what Wittgenstein was speaking of when he wrote, “If we speak of
a thing, but there is no object that we can point to, there, we may see, is the spirit.” 38 Clack
writes:
Engelmann has written that Wittgenstein’s life and work suggests “the possibility of a
new spiritual attitude,” an attitude summed up by the term “wordless faith.” In this faith
of the future, there will be no verbal doctrines, for these become the source of
misconstructions. Intimation of the divine, rather than talk of the divine, will be the heart
of wordless faith. Wittgenstein’s remark that the “religion of the future will have to be
extremely ascetic; and by that I don’t mean just going without food and drink.” The
religion of the Tractatus, then, is ascetic in the sense of denying oneself the rich tapestry
of doctrinal expression. In place of that, it encapsulates a stoic attitude and a particular
way of looking at the world, seeing it as a “miracle”. 39
Eliot seeks to close the gap between the religious and secular, objectivity and
subjectivity, the mystical and the real, that for him had never existed. Wisdom for Eliot is
discovered between the words and paradoxes, so that God still is that which cannot be explained,
only reached at through sensory experience. In a time when humanity is confronted with the
overwhelming awareness of death, Eliot’s transcends accepted forms of knowing into a world
where the words themselves become transubstantiated through their sounds and image-provoking
qualities. Out of the utter despair Eliot conveys in “The Wasteland” comes Four Quartets,
illustrating the hope modernity has found in Nietzsche’s proclamation of God’s death. With what
Wolosky calls a linguistic asceticism, Eliot “kills” words, just as the elements in the Quartets
die, and finds meaning in the paradoxes themselves. In this unwritten space lies a legitimate form
of truth-seeking that emphasizes sensory experience in place of logic. Eliot thus turns away from
Western binary thinking to embrace Eastern, particularly Buddhist, conceptions of truth which
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shy away from the rationality taking root in the West. Like the Hindu god Shiva who possesses a
third eye of wisdom, Eliot refuses to see through the lenses of dichotomies. His poetry is a mix
of philosophies, fragments of language that communicates through both logic and the senses.
In this life of exploring, Eliot suggests that paradoxes can only be raised and felt; the
complete wisdom of their unity only comes in the after-life when the destruction of our
constructed language and time will allow us to dissolve the apparent contradiction and see each
thing as part of a unified whole. This constant cycle of building images, stripping them down to
bits of wisdom, then rebuilding again that weaves throughout Four Quartets evinces Eliot’s
cataphatic tendencies and the shortsightedness of Wolosky’s claims. By ending Four Quartets at
Little Gidding, a remote place of spirituality in the English countryside, Eliot suggests that in the
death of God, as illustrated in “The Wasteland” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” new
life can be built through words, but not in their literal denotations. Like the church of Little
Gidding itself, this way will be difficult to locate, a remote haven that asks us to reconsider our
normal ways of knowing to experience, feel and hear our way to new images of the Divine.
24
1
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: Routledge, 200), 74.
Shira Wolosky, Language Mysticism: The Negative Ways of Language in Elio, Beckett, and Celan (Palo Alto:
Standford UP, 2001), 45.
3
John Caputo, “How the Secular World Became Post-Secular,” in On Religion (New York, Routledge, 2001), 46.
4
Caputo, 99.
5
Caputo, 47.
6
Anselm of Canterbury, “Anselm’s Proslogium or Discourse on the Existence of God,” from Medieval Sourcebook,
trans. Sidney N. Deane, Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies. Web. (accessed March, 15 2010).
7
John MacQuarrie, “Neo-Thomism and Roman Catholic Theology,” in Twentieth Century Religious Thoughts
(Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002), 289.
8
Brian Clack, “The Mystical,” in An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
UP, 1999), 200.
9
James Livingston et al, “Christian Existentialism,” in Modern Christian Thought: The Twentieth Century
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 147.
10
T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Word: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (Gloucester: Dodo Press, 2009), 7.
11
David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After (Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1987), 27.
12
Wittgenstein, 149.
13
MacQuarrie, 289.
14
Jacques Maritain, “Creative Intuition and Poetic Knowledge,” in Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton UP, 1953), 11.
15
Stephane Malarmé, Correspondance, 1862-1871, ed. Henri Mondor (Paris, Gallimard, 1959), 1.
16
Paul Valery, The Art of Poetry (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), 2.
17
Ibid., 42.
18
Weil, Simone, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 1952), 98.
19
Eliot, The Sacred Wood, 117.
20
Perkins, 27.
21
Thomas Merton, “A Christian look at Zen,” in Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master, ed. Lawrence Cunningham
(Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1992), 403.
22
Ibid., 411.
23
Merton, 36. Maritain, 402.
24
Merton, 403.
25
David Tracy, “Fragments: The Spiritual Situation of Our Times,” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999), 175.
26
Paul Murray, T.S. Eliot and Mysticism: The Secret History of “Four Quartets” (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1991), 43.
27
Ibid., 53.
28
Cleo McNelly Kearns, T.S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and Belief (Cambridge, Cambridge UP,
1987), 153.
29
Ibid., 157.
30
Ibid., 266.
31
Staffan Bergsten, “The Later Quartets,” in Time and Eternity: A Study in the Structure and Symbolism of T.S.
Eliot’s “Four Quartets” (Stockholm: Svenska, 1960), 153.
32
Kearn, 18.
33
Ibid., 231.
34
Kearnes, 230.
35
Wolosky, 49.
36
Bergsten, 165.
37
Wolosky, 14.
38
Clack, 45.
39
Ibid., 47.
2
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