Burnt Norton and Advent

I was watching Ralph Fiennes recite “The Four Quartets,” (which is really pretty good if you can make yourself receptive to it; well, I have to do that, anyway), and I couldn’t remember where the places were that provide the titles for the poems. So as I listened, I turned to Wikipedia (as one does). Now I wouldn’t go to Wikipedia for literary criticism (it’s been a long time since I was studying that academically. Experience has impressed upon me that I’m a dinosaur in that field now), but the general exegesis of the poems reflected there struck me as fodder for Advent meditations; if only as a general statement of principles.

I think the consensus view there is wrong, but that isn’t the subject here. I wouldn’t even turn to Wikipedia, except that it’s universally accessible to anyone accessing these posts, and that makes it available so you can clarify what I’m referring to (or disagree, if you like). Anyway, the general principle there made me think about Advent in new ways, and how I could use it (if not the poems themselves; that might be too much), to examine some ideas around the season.

You’ll find links to the individual poems on Wikipedia at that link above. All of them describe the difficulty of salvation, and what must be sacrificed to obtain it; and so we never gain salvation, nor can we. And so, it is useless and God is useless because our situation is irredeemable without God, and we cannot redeem it with God, and so there is ultimately only despair. Despair and (vain) hope that the impossible can be done by humankind, and what is offered finally becomes acceptable. But cannot be accepted, because it is only metaphysical; and we know that is neither possible, nor attainable. ”to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.”

What a load of crap.* Making it impossible, resting it on a “faith” we think humankind once had, but has now lost, and can never recover, we despair for what we cannot have because we cannot accept it and cannot believe because we no longer “believe.” 

To be clear, I think Eliot was more clear sighted, and intelligent, than that. (I’ll also freely state I think Auden is the better Christian thinker/poet.) For the simplest reason (I told you I wasn’t going to exegete the “Quartets.”), that Eliot ends his cycle referencing (and reviving for an audience who’d probably never heard of her) Julian of Norwich. “Little Gidding” introduced me to Julian, and I think spawned a renewed popular interest that made her name recognizable to the general public. And Julian was anything but despairing about God or salvation.

Julian wrote, and rewrote, her “Book of Shewings” (her language was Middle English), following visions she had during a near death experience. Her visions are complex, but a theme running through them is reconciliation. In her vision she despairs for the state of the world, but Christ tells her that everything will be saved, “and all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

That alone is good for a protracted meditation during Advent. It expresses the precise nature of the season, and the preparation for the Christmas celebration. This salvation, in Julian’s vision, is not a matter of acceptance, or confession, or faith, or “belief.” Which is why all things will be well.

To shift this discussion to Isaiah (the Hebrew Scriptures selection for the First Sunday of Advent this year; you’ll see), the holy mountain isn’t a matter of belief, the reversal that is God’s justice is not solely a matter of belief (it can be known without believing; that is the nature of reversal, whether it is justice or Greek tragedy. Even the tragic hero doesn’t believe the reversal, until he can’t deny it. That is when the iron bites, and the tragedy is fulfilled. Greek tragedy is all about the recognition. Without it, it’s just a dreary story. When Oedipus realized what he had done; when Creon’s prayer for release through death is not granted; that’s when the tragedy slams shut the door and offers no escape from responsibility.) God’s justice reverses human injustice, and it is true whether you see it that way or not, whether you accept the explanation, or not. You are left out, but you are still let in. You are saved, and not damned, whether you think in terms of soteriology, or not. Salvation doesn’t require your acquiescence, your acceptance. It is there, apart from you or a part of you depending on…you. You move toward it, you move away from it: the responsibility is yours. It is the simplest of choices, not dependent upon systems and events of history and others finally thinking as one, finally setting aside as one whatever is considered the obstacle to the final answer, the balancing side of the equation. There is no “to come.” There is no “some day, one day.” There is only here, now, always. The still point of the turning world. Wisdom. Recognition. And where does that come from?

Ah, that’s the question, isn’t it? 

I am drawing from the analysis presented in the Wikipedia articles about the poems of Eliot’s Four Quartets (even though I’m barely presenting it here). Not because I agree with the consensus presented there, but to use it as an arguing point. I think Eliot is actually wiser and more clever than these explanations (or at least his poems are), but the point of my purpose is to discuss the wisdom Paul calls the world’s, against God’s wisdom which, Paul says, the world calls foolishness. And what is more foolish than thinking a child’s birth is so important a ritual year begins with anticipation of it? The birth of the Pharaohs were considered auspicious and notable, because the Pharaohs were gods. That’s probably why the observance of the birth of the Christchild began with the church in Egypt, 2 centuries before the church in Rome took it up. Yet the Christ is not worshipped as a Pharaoh, and the birthdays of the Pharaohs died with them, as ours do with us. Which proves nothing, but points to something curious; to wisdom, or foolishness. Two more conditions, to reference Eliot, which often appear alike. I can’t give you the final answer. I can only adopt Wittgenstein’s analogy of the fly in the bottle. He called the fly modern (contemporary is more accurate) humanity trapped in the bottle of philosophical error. He saw his task as trying to show the fly the way out of the bottle. I’m not Wittgenstein, but I feel the same way about the discussions of salvation in the analyses of the four poems. It’s like watching a fly, and wishing you could show it the exit from what it thinks is an inextricable dilemma. Except the fly didn’t make the bottle; and humanity made its own spiritual prison, and can’t see the way out of it. They cannot let go of the original error.

“And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Not when the fire and the rose are one, but when the wisdom of God (“a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything”) becomes the wisdom of humankind, and everyone wants to share in what is freely available on God’s holy mountain. Not because it is God, but because it is good. That’s the point of Isaiah’s vision (and Julian’s). It doesn’t matter what you believe. It is there, and you can learn from it. It is there, and you can be a part of it. Either way, it is there.

*Part of my complaint is very particular. To hold what I’ll unfairly call the “consensus view” of the four poems, you have to think Eliot’s views didn’t change from the “bit of rhythmic grumbling” that he later described “The Waste Land” to be. Eliot’s adoption of Christianity was fully as valid, and complex in character, as Auden’s (although I think Auden was the better religious thinker). Anyway, to cut to the chase:  in order to accept the “consensus view” on what Eliot says about Christianity in his last great poems, you literally have to throw out the baby and the bath water AND the tub, and presume the nervous breakdown he had, and the events of his life after “Waste Land,” simply had no effect on him.

But my exegetical preference is to leave the author’s biography out of it also, and to not try to analyze the author’s intent, either. So maybe that’s the problem.