Tag: Literature

Ending or Beginning – Choices We Make

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Richard John Neuhaus, founder and editor of First Things magazine, once wrote that there are writers whom you read because you have been told you must read them. Having done so, he said that they then become part of your history, along with foreign countries you have visited or great music you have heard. It was all part of the never-ending process called learning, “and a very good thing it is.” But then, he added, there are writers who catch you up short. “They are personally disruptive; intellectually and spiritually disruptive. They cannot be fitted into anything so smoothly incremental as a ‘process’. Their claims demand a decision, and contingent upon that decision is a change of disposition toward a host of questions. The thought cannot be resisted: ‘If he’s right about this, then I have to rethink an awful lot that follows from this’.”

Romano Guardini (1885–1968) is such a writer, he said. He did not mention Guardini’s nearly exact contemporary, Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965). He was another such. Guardini wrote toward the end of what was probably his most startling work, The End of the Modern World, that his purpose was “to declare a truth when its ‘hour’ has come.” Nearly thirty years earlier T. S. Eliot very controversially began to engage with the same purpose in a process which led him from the apparently very dark place which some find in The Waste Land to his conversion to Christianity and beyond.

Both these great figures of the twentieth century are frequently depicted as conservative opponents of modernity who invoke a curse on all its ways and all its pomps. Conservatives they certainly were because their great cause was Truth and the truth embodied in the essence and traditions of Christianity. Ironically, Eliot, with the publication of The Waste Land, which his earlier poems, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock and Portrait of a Lady, were harbingers, is identified as one of the fathers of modernist literature. He was radical, but it is a misreading of his work to interpret it as a destruction of the cultural heritage of the past.

Some readers find Guardini’s The End of the Modern World polemical. Neuhaus says that “polemics are sometimes necessary to catch attention and clear the air of cant, but Guardini is up to much more than polemics. He is proposing a different way of discovering one’s ‘location’ in the world, a different way of standing before history and finally before God.” Eliot was not polemical, but in many ways he was on the same journey as Guardini: devoutly Christian and fastidious and fearless in seeking a restoration in the Western world of its Christian heritage. Indeed, like Guardini, he saw such a restoration—particularly in the face of the horrors unleashed in World War II—as the only hope for our civilisation.

In 1943 Eliot had written in a Portuguese journal that “no European literature, I am convinced, can long flourish in isolation from the others”; instead, “the ultimate unity of Europe cannot come through identity of political organisation, but from the unity of the Christian Faith.” Lecturing and reading for the British Council in Germany in late 1949, he toured Hamburg, Berlin, Hanover, Göttingen, Münster, Bonn, Cologne, Heidelberg, and Munich. He spoke about the unity of European culture. Throughout, he emphasised that “the culture of every people arises from their religion”, and stressed the cultural bonds forming “the organism of Europe”.

Guardini’s reflections on ‘Power and Responsibility’ are strangely prescient for our own age. That is the title of part two of The End of the Modern World, written in the 1950s, as the Cold War burgeoned. He wrote: “Aside from a few constitutional optimists and those reassured by a fixed ideology, the people we meet everywhere today are marked by a profound anxiety. This is directed primarily at concrete political-historical possibilities, but reaches beyond them to the fundamental question: Is man still a match for his own works? During the course of the last century (as in the last 100 years), man has developed a measure of power far exceeding any previous dreams. This power has largely objectified itself in scientific insights and forms of work that give rise to constant new problems; in political structures that look toward the future; in technical patterns which seem to press ahead, propelled by their own dynamism; finally, and above all, in the spiritual-intellectual attitudes of man himself, attitudes with a logic of their own. The anxiety we mentioned questions whether man is capable of handling all this in such a way that he can endure with honour in fruitfulness and joy; and it tends to answer, no. Man as he is today no longer can meet such demands. His works and their effects have outstripped him, making themselves independent. They have acquired meta-human, cosmic, not to say demonic, characteristics which man can no longer assimilate or direct.”

Did Guardini see any way of avoiding this deep malaise and its catastrophic consequences? He offered this: One of the main decisions which future man will have to make, he said, will have to be based on the realisation that man is determined by the spirit—and not confuse the spirit with “nature”, in either its romantic or scientific senses. He held that the spirit lives and acts neither by historical nor by metaphysical necessity, but of its own impulse. It is free. It draws its ultimate life and health from its right relation to the true and the good, a relation which it is also free to deny or destroy. “Man does not belong exclusively to the world; rather he stands on its borders, at once in the world yet outside it, integrated into it yet simultaneously dealing with it because he is related directly to God. Not to the ‘Spirit of the Age’, not to the ‘All-Mysterious One’, not to any First Cause—but to the sovereign Lord, Creator of all being, who called man into existence and sustains him in that vocation, who gave the world into his keeping, and who will demand an account of what he has done with it.”

T. S. Eliot’s position, not long after he published The Waste Land (1922), was much the same. Cleanth Brooks, American literary scholar and critic, in his analysis of The Waste Land offers a reading of the poem which is more optimistic than that of some other critics, including that of the great, if sometimes controversial, Cambridge literary scholar, F. R. Leavis. Brooks cites the last line of Canto 26 of Dante’s Purgatorio, in which Dante meets the poet Arnaut Daniel, who warns him in his own language, Sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor (In due time be heedful of my pain). The passage from which Eliot took this quotation was of extraordinary importance to the poet.

Before Arnaut leaps back into the refining fire of Purgatory with joy he says: “I am Arnaut who weep and singing; contrite I see my past folly, and joyful I see before me the way I hope for. Now I pray you by that virtue which guides you to the summit of the stair, at times be mindful of my pain.” The protagonist of The Waste Land is the gloomy mythological figure, Tiresias, and he is bemoaning his disinheritance, being robbed of tradition in this modern world, now in decay. But the protagonist of the poem is not its author, and its author reveals a more hopeful view of the future.

Brooks says he cannot accept Mr Leavis’ interpretation of the passage, “I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me,” as meaning that the poem “exhibits no progression.” If secularisation has destroyed, or is likely to destroy, modern civilization—“London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down”—the poet suggests a resolution in his question, “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” The Scriptural allusions in The Waste Land are remarkable. Notably one which is interpreted as referring to Christ’s accompaniment of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, with all the hope embodied in that passage of the New Testament—regardless of Eliot’s note which connects it to an account of Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

There is hope for our civilisation. Perhaps distant, but still there is hope. Guardini offers us the same—if we can but correct our ways. Brooks asks us to consider, in this context, the last sentences of Eliot’s ‘Thoughts After Lambeth’ (1930): “The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail. But we must be very patient awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the darkness before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.” By this time Eliot had converted to Christianity and had attached himself to a very devout Anglo-Catholic tradition within the Church of England.

By 1948 Eliot had come a long way. At the presentation of the Nobel Prize in Stockholm on 10 December of that year, Anders Österling, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, spoke of him as a poet who “from an extremely exclusive and consciously isolated position” had “gradually come to exercise a very far-reaching influence”. His verse and prose had “a capacity to cut into the consciousness of our generation with the sharpness of a diamond”. Österling ended by pointing out that “Exactly twenty-five years ago, there stood where you are now standing another famous poet who wrote in the English tongue, William Butler Yeats.”

Undoubtedly, Romano Guardini and T. S. Eliot are two towering figures in twentieth-century religious culture, Eliot the more publicly known of the two. Their struggles to restore the Christian values of our civilisation still resonate in our new century. We can only hope that their prophetic and ultimately optimistic visions of our future world will still be realised.

Technology, well-being and our future world

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

It is difficult to pick up a serious newspaper or magazine, or tune in to a serious podcast today, without finding another essay where someone is worrying about modern technology’s dire impact on our mental health, our political life and our literacy. 

Thomas Edsall mused at length in The New York Times (October 14) on ‘The rise of the Smartphone and the Fall of Western Democracy’. He drew on the research and arguments of, among others, Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge.

Haidt is  a social psychologist at New York University;  Twenge, is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University.  Their extensive and rigorous research shows that there is a clear correlation — and perhaps a causal relationship — between the rise of smartphones and an abrupt escalation of teenage anxiety, depression and suicidal tendencies, especially among girls growing up in liberal families.

Haidt has launched an international movement to ban smartphones in schools. There have been a number of American and European studies showing that doing so leads to improvements in student performance and behaviour. However, in April 2025 the often contrarian British medical journal The Lancet questioned the evidence supporting these school policies. Some might say, ‘It would, wouldn’t it’.

But that’s just about the smartphone and its power to distract and confuse children.

Edsall also sees a new and major player threatening us all – the growing use of artificial intelligence. In September, Derek Thompson, co-author with Ezra Klein of the book Abundance, expanded and revised concerns about all this in an essay that originally ran in The Argument, an online magazine. “We can”, he wrote, “already see how technology is affecting our capacity to think deeply right now. And I am much more concerned about the decline of thinking people than I am about the rise of thinking machines.”

Thompson argued that students’ use of A.I. is leading to “the demise of writing,” which matters because writing is an act of thinking. This is as true for professionals as it is for students. In “Writing Is Thinking,” an editorial in Nature, the authors argued that “outsourcing the entire writing process to L.L.M.s (Large Language Models) deprives scientists of the important work of understanding what they’ve discovered and why it matters.”

Why does all this matter? Thompson argued it’s the patience to read long and complex texts, to hold conflicting ideas in our heads and enjoy their dissonance, to engage in hand-to-hand combat at the sentence level within a piece of writing — and to value these things at a time when valuing them is a choice, because video entertainment is replacing reading and ChatGPT essays are replacing writing. “As A.I. becomes abundant, there is a clear and present threat that deep human thinking will become scarce,” he said.

The Free Press has also weighed in on this issue. 

In a special feature on what the editors call ‘The Dawn of the Postliterate Society’ they remind us that It’s no secret that young people today are desperate for meaning. A recent report found that 58 percent of young adults experienced little or no sense of purpose in their lives over the past month. Some attribute this to social media. Others, to a lack of religion.

In an essay in the same online publication, James Marriott of The Times (London) explains why the stakes couldn’t be higher. Our liberal democracy, he writes, was built by widespread literacy—the same widespread literacy that is now being dismantled by screens. Unless we start reading again, he says, our civilisation may not survive.

In another article in The Times, Marriott quotes the great American journalist, chronicler of the wild ‘Sixties’, Joan Didion, writing “I write to find out what I’m thinking”.

Marriott says that for anybody whose job involves writing, the evidence is clear: those who don’t read or who outsource their essays to AI lose the facility for complex thought. “Not reading or writing would be unthinkable”

He cites a paper published earlier this summer by scientists at MIT which restates Didion’s thesis with less elegance but with more empirical rigour. The researchers used wearable brain scanners to measure the cognitive activity of a group of students who used AI to help them write their essays and a group who did the work themselves. The AI-assisted writers ‘consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioural levels’ compared with those who wrote their own essays. They needed to write in order to think.

But is anyone fighting back? According to, again, the indomitable Free Press, someone is. Enter Shilo Brooks, former Princeton professor and the host of Old School, a new Free Press podcast dedicated to the notion that there is one simple way to bring America’s lost generation home: via reading. “When a man is starved for love, work, purpose, money, or vitality,” Shilo explains, “a novel wrestling with these themes can be metabolized as energy for the heart.” 

Good for Professor Brooks – and good for us all. But Gerald Howard, in another New York Times essay wonders if literary fiction – the fiction which tells us the truth about ourselves – despite its resilience since the very beginning of literature with ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’ and the epics of Homer is not now threatened by “the structural and cultural headwinds of our time.” 

We mean those we have just explored and our thinking world is now agonising about.

“Is this genre  now in danger of extinction from,” he asks, “a declining attention span, a disappearing audience of people educated enough to understand and appreciate it, or a near-future technological onslaught (see: novels written by A.I. entities)? The sense of a possible ending is palpable.”

Nevertheless, Howard, a retired practitioner at the coalface of publishing, is an optimist and he illustrates how great literature has had to struggle against the odds for centuries. Literature is fragile, he admits. “It serves no obvious purpose. It does not feed us or clothe us or, unless you get very lucky, enrich us. But literature is also as close to immortal as any cultural endeavour of humankind has ever been.” 

Moby-Dick, he points out, “the novel that is America’s clearest contribution to world literature, was so misunderstood and reviled upon its 1851 publication that it destroyed Herman Melville’s career. He had to take up work for the rest of his life as a customs inspector on the New York docks, and his obituary in this paper (the NYT) referred to “Mobie Dick.” It was only after his death and the novel’s rediscovery in the early 20th century that it was recognized for the masterpiece it is.”

“In the mid-1940s every one of William Faulkner’s 20 published works was either out of print or very difficult to find. Faulkner had to grind out screenplays for Hollywood studios to make a living.”

Then he won the Nobel Prize and hasn’t been out of print since.

Think of The Great Gatsby, written and forgotten about until it was distributed free to America’s GIs in the Second World War. It now competes with Moby Dick for the title of  The Great American Novel. 

Technology will do great good for the human race. It will probably also do great harm. But we believe that the human spirit is indomitable and so long as it is we can hope that the great works of literature and great works to come will prevail.

The Journey of T. S. Eliot

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Part Two

In the heart of Périgueux’s historic district, stands Saint-Front Cathedral

In August 1919 Eliot was still battling with the ideas and the form that would become The Waste Land. In that month he went, with Ezra Pound, on a walking tour of Provence. At one point they separated, Pound leaving to meet his wife. At this stage Eliot made what Matthew Hollis describes in his 2022 book on The Waste Land as a “his defining visit to Périgueux cathedral”. Hollis continues by saying that no account of what happened there is available but that “what is known is that what took place at the cathedral would be a turning point in Eliot’s life”.

The cathedral was dedicated to the legendary St Front, sent by St Peter to preach in the lands of Aquitaine. It was its later history which moved Eliot in some way, perhaps through the example of the powerful convictions of the protagonists of a later story. Provence and Aquitaine became battlegrounds in which Christianity had to confront two separate heresies in different ages, Arianism in one age and Albigensianism in another. 

Bishop Paternus had been deposed as the Bishop of Périgueux in 361 AD for preaching Arianism, the heresy which held that Jesus was not truly the Son of God, and unequal to Him. Paternus, was fiercely punished by St Hilary of Poitiers, known as the “Hammer of Arians”. Hilary proclaimed that to deny the Trinity was not only folly, but  a heresy. In substance Hilary said: To undertake such a thing is to embark upon the boundless, to dare the incomprehensible; to attempt to speak of God with more refinement than He has provided us with; it is enough that He has given His nature through the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. “Whatever is sought over and above this is beyond the meaning of words, beyond the limits of perception, beyond the embrace of understanding.”

Hilary was writing in the fourth century but his  language would resonate in Eliot in the twentieth. Eliot now found himself rudderless. It would be more than twenty years until his belief in the Blessed Trinity would flower definitively in Four Quartets. But in the early 1920s he still had many miles to travel. Nevertheless, these early Christian struggles shattered what was left of Eliot’s Unitarian foundations. 

Hollis writes:

In Périgueux, that summer, Eliot was a son separated from the love of a father in death and in life, and had yet to find the guidance of a holy spirit with which his joining of the Church of England in 1927 would allow him to commune. In the chronicles of the building before him, and in his walking conversations with Pound, Eliot could trace the accounts of martyrs and heretics alike who had gone into exile – or gone into the fire – for their convictions or their sins, people who had found a measure to live by and even to die for, who had found a family of higher calling. What had Eliot to offer compared to such commitment? Not the “one great tragedy” of the war in which he was denied a part. Not the daily negotiations at the bank for a treaty that he considered immoral and unjust, and altogether “a bad peace”. Not the wedding vows, taken before God, that seemed to him to have turned to ashes in his hands. He found he had no ideological framework from which to respond. The Unitarianism of his childhood seemed to him a poor man’s fuddle: a culture of humanitarianism, of ethical mind games rather than a passionate adherence to Incarnation, Heaven and Hell… And in the absence of a religious conviction, his writing simply could not bear the weight: regarded merely for its satire and wit, it had yet to find the ground from which to respond to the intensity of the emotions he was experiencing.

Eliot now felt alone. Pound was a kind of Confucian and this meant nothing to Eliot. “There are moments,” wrote Eliot in 1935, “perhaps not known to everyone, when a man may be nearly crushed by the terrible awareness of his isolation from every other human being.” But this religious anxiety filling him at times with a sense of dispossession, of emptiness, turned out in fact to be cathartic, his dark night of the soul.

Hollis interprets it this way: “a dispossession was also an exorcism: a word to describe the purging of demons, as applied by the Catholic Church from as early as its second century: it is a removal of the bad by the good. But that wasn’t exactly what Eliot had said. A dispossession not of the dead but by the dead:  not an action undertaken by him, but one done to him.”

He was now experiencing intimations of Purgatory, something alien to the theology of Unitarianism but surely something which might have remained in his subconscious from Annie Dunn’s prayers for the souls she believed to be in that place for a time. Hollis comments:

What transfixed Eliot in this moment was not heaven and hell, but purgatory, the temporary suffering or expiation for the purpose of spiritual cleansing. “In purgatory the torment of flame is deliberately and consciously accepted by the penitent,” Eliot wrote in his 1929 Dante. He made his own translation of the moment in the Purgatorio in which Dante is approached by souls from the  flames: “Then certain of them made towards me, so far as they could, but ever watchful not to come so far that they should not be in the fire. The souls in purgatory suffer “because they wish to suffer, for purgation”, he wrote, because they wish to be in the fire, because “in their suffering is hope”. 

Dante and Virgil encountering souls in Purgatory

In such a moment of isolation, Hollis notes, Eliot would write in years to come, he felt only pity for the man who found himself alone, as he had, “alone with himself and his meanness and futility, alone without God”. Even later he wrote that to be without the company of God is to be abandoned to the wilderness, to an endless seesaw between anarchy and tyranny: “a seesaw which in the secular world, I believe, has no end”. 

Eliot’s The Waste Land  was, in a way, a journey through Purgatory. Indeed its power to this day may ultimately rest on its character as a grim but hopeful reminder of this supernatural reality believed in by Christians and Jewish people. The Scriptural basis for the Christian belief in Purgatory is the instruction of Judas Maccabeus to his soldiers to pray for the souls of their dead companions.

The three last words of The Waste Land, one word repeated three times in fact, are Shantih shantih shantih. Eliot’s note on this tells us that repeated as here, they are a formal ending to an Upanishad. He adds a translation, “The peace which passeth understanding”, but says that this is “a feeble translation of the content of this word.”

Eliot’s great poem was soon recognised as a masterpiece of the modern world. Eliot took a few more years to reach his shantih in the Christian faith. He did reach it and from that vantage gave English literature more than one magnificent literary work which reflected the spirit of his now Christian soul.

The Journey of Thomas Stearns Eliot

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Part One

A cold coming he had of it. First there was the sterile unitarian background of his family in St. Louis. Then there was the rejection by his first love, Emily Hale – even though they became life-long epistolary confidants. Next there was the half-exile in England and the family rancour which his tragic marriage to Vivienne Haig-Wood provoked. Add to all that, living through the terrible war which he had to watch from the sidelines, combined with its aftermath when all the hopes of humanity were painfully drained from European civilisation for decades.

All this fed into his tortured soul and helped produce his most famous – if not his greatest – masterpiece, The Waste Land, in 1922. Within that complicated and mysterious work, however, are early glimpses of a soul emerging from the grim panorama of an apparently decaying and hopeless world. In it intimations can already be felt of the journey he had already unconsciously embarked upon:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you?

Of course no reader of Eliot’s poetry – or, he would hold, any genuine poetry – should dare to say what he meant by any given assembly of lines. But that does not mean that they did not mean something.

There is an account of a reading in Oxford in 1929 of the very difficult poem, Ash Wednesday, a kind of confession of faith at the time of his conversion, in which a polite student asked him ‘Please, sir, what do you mean by the line: “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree” . Eliot looked at him – I hope kindly – and said: ‘I mean, “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree.” In 1948 Eliot said of poetry,“A poem does not say something, it is something”.

Matthew Hollis in his magnificent book on The Waste Land, published in 2022, quotes Eliot as saying “…that in the construction of the poem (and here he paused to spell out precisely what he meant by construction: what he called ‘the mental operation of writing it’) there had been no appearance of an ‘intellectual generalisation’, only mood, variation and associative memory. That may have been keeping his powder dry, but in doing so he rehearsed an increasingly familiar position that no reader should look to an author for meaning, whether or not it stands for a civilisation in decline. ‘It may certainly be what the poem “means”,’ he commented, ‘so long as that is not identified with what the author is supposed to have consciously meant when he wrote it.’  Meaning, in other words, lies at the discretion of the reader”.

Using that discretion is one of the great joys of reading great poetry. It is also one of the keys to revealing the truth which unfolds in our ears, before our eyes and in our hearts through the images, intimations and moods which make up the totality of a poetic work.

But what we glean about Eliot’s journey – and of course we are talking of his journey to the Christian faith – is to be found in more than his verse. Hard facts are not wanting.

We know, for example, that Eliot, in his examination of the legacies of our past, had given much thought to the role of tradition in the religions of the world. Robert Crawford, in the first volume of his biography of the poet, Young Eliot, which takes us up to the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, noted:

He had been thinking more widely, too, about tradition and theology. To innovate, he argued, required consciousness of tradition, even if only to avoid repeating what had been accomplished already. Yet ‘Tradition’ with a capital ‘T’ could be a mere repository of unexamined practices. Strikingly, when reflecting on contemporary poetry in late 1917, he had suggested that ‘for an authoritative condemnation of theories attaching extreme importance to tradition as a criterion of truth, readers should consult a nineteenth-century papal encyclical… Tom’s commitment to avant-garde work by Joyce and Wyndham Lewis accompanied his reading of Catholic theologically-minded philosophers including Father John Rickaby, Cardinal Joseph Mercier (whose Manual of Modem Scholastic Philosophy was published in English in 1917) and Father Peter Coffey on interpretation of the tradition of ‘modern Catholic thought’. Tom belonged to no church. Yet, visiting Anglo-Catholic City churches in his lunch hours, he was conscious of Catholicism as ‘the only Church which can even pretend to maintain a philosophy of its own, a philosophy, as we are increasingly aware, which is succeeding in establishing a claim to be taken quite seriously’.

Thomas Stearns was the seventh and last child of Charlotte and Henry (Hal) Eliot. She was forty- three when he was born. Matthew Hollis recounts how his upbringing was entrusted to Annie Dunn, a nursemaid of Irish parents from Co. Cork, who heated the bath water for Eliot each morning, and whose affectionate presence in the house warmed the space in the young boy’s life that his mother left vacant. It was Annie, said Eliot later, who was his earliest influence, and the household figure to whom he was greatly attached. She took him to school, and sometimes to pray in the small Catholic Church of Immaculate Conception which she attended. There he would delight in the colourful statues, the bright paper flowers and glowing lights. It was with Annie that he had his first conversations about the presence of God. To a young boy of six and seven, her religion was the vivid entertainment that his family’s Unitarianism was not. ‘I was devoted to her,’ he recalled.

Who can measure influence, especially at so young an age? But all truth is not measurable to us and it would be foolish to rule out the influence of Annie on the intimations of mortality – and immortality – revealed later by Eliot. When he showed Gerontion, his pre-Waste Land poem about old age and death to his sceptical friend Ezra Pound, he is also reported to have revealed something of his ongoing wrestling with religion: ‘I am afraid of the life after death,’ he told his friend. A religious anxiety worried him, filling him at times with a sense of dispossession, of emptiness.

Eliot, without apology, ‘borrowed’ from others and from tradition for his own art.

About Gerontion he wrote to Pound: “But I can show you in the thing I enclose how I have borrowed  from half a dozen sources.” Among the borrowings to which he referred was The Dream of Gerontius, a poem by John Henry Newman written in 1865 after his conversion to Roman Catholicism. The poem was set to music in 1900 in a magnificent choral work by Edward Elgar. Newman’s poem follows a life through to death into reawakening before God.

Eliot’s pre Waste Land years were full of influences which laid the foundations not only for his great poem but also for that moment when he discovered that he was “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods”. But to reach that point his journey had to take him through The Waste Land.

(Posted on Position Papers,  in In Passing)

Part Two next Friday

The Power and the Glory – “a work of singular literary value”

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Giovanni Batista Montini – St. Pope Paul VI

Graham Greene was a complicated man – and his novels were no less complicated. He clearly did not shy away from leaving people with problems to think about – and we can only thank him for that. His life was also somewhat complicated. He was a convert, his conversion initially motivated by his love for a devout Catholic woman. But he was neither a faithful husband nor, after a time and for many years, a faithful Catholic. But he died reconciled to the faith, the Church and its sacraments. 

He was never hostile to the faith and once wrote to a cardinal, “I wish to emphasise that, throughout my life as a Catholic, I have never ceased to feel deep sentiments of personal attachment to the Vicar of Christ, fostered in particular by admiration for the wisdom with which the Holy Father has constantly guided God’s Church. I have always been vividly impressed by the high spirituality which characterises the Government of Pius XII. Your Eminence knows that I had the honour of a private audience during the holy year 1950. I shall retain my impression of it until my last breath.” 

His novels reflected much of the turmoil of his own journey in the faith and were, still are, valued by many for the negative capability they have to tell the truth about the human condition and mankind’s struggle to be good in the face of the evils assailing him from without and from within.

One prominent churchman made this assessment of his work, writing that “his harsh and acerbic art touches the hearts of the least receptive and reminds them, however gloomy they may be, of the awe-inspiring presence of God and the poisonous bite of sin. He addresses those who are most distant and hostile – those whom we will never reach”.

The Power and the Glory, probably Greene’s most famous novel, was the context in which those remarks were made. It was published in 1940 but did not become controversial in Catholic circles until the 1950s. Prompted by this, the Vatican appointed two consultants to study the book in 1953. Both were critical, deeming it immoral and in the opinion of one, “odd and paradoxical, a true product of the disturbed, confused and audacious character of today’s civilisation”.

The novel is set in the southern-Mexican state of Tabasco, which is governed by a ruthless persecutor of Catholics, Tomas Garrido Canabal. An atheist and a puritan, Canabal detested organised religion and alcohol. The central figure in Greene’s book is an alcoholic priest, who is put to death by Canabal’s police at the end of the novel. Although he anticipates his execution, and knows that he is walking into a trap, he chooses to perform what he sees as his duty and attempts to give the last sacraments to a fatally wounded criminal. The priest puts the chance of saving another man’s soul ahead of his own survival. Is he a martyr? Or is he being justly punished for his lax and scandalous life? The moral and theology of The Power and the Glory are ambiguous. Unfortunately ambiguity – which is at the heart of much of the literature we treasure— is something to which many of a censorious and too literal – as opposed to literary – turn of mind are both deaf and blind.

But not so, Cardinal Giovanni Batista Montini, pro-secretary of state at the Vatican, and later to be elected Pope Paul VI in 1963. Montini, hearing of the controversy and the drift which the Vatican officials were taking, wrote to the secretary of the Index of Forbidden Books (disbanded in 1966) in the Holy Office that the book was “a work of singular literary value. I see that it is judged a sad book. I have no objection to make to the just observations [of this work]. But it seems to me that, in such a judgment, there is lacking a sense of the work’s fundamental merits. They lie, fundamentally, in its high quality of vindication, by revealing a heroic fidelity to his own ministry within the innermost soul of a priest who is in many respects reprehensible”

He suggested to the Holy Office that “it would be well to have the book assessed by another consultant before passing a negative judgement on it, not least because author and book are known worldwide”. Monsignor De Luca – whom Montini suggested – concurred with him about the book’s literary quality and morality:

“Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh according to expert opinion, are to be considered the two major living novelists: being Catholic they do credit to Rome’s faith, and they do credit to it in a country that is of Protestant civilization and culture. How can Rome be gruff and cruel? They are the successors of Chesterton and Belloc and, like them, rather than attempting to convert the small fry, strive to influence superior intelligences and the spirit of the age in a manner favourable to Catholicism.”

“This,” De Luca went on, “is not a matter of heresy or even a scandal; it has nothing to do with theologians or depraved persons. We are dealing with great writers, who are often naive and obstinate like children, in states of mind that are, from time to time, not inclined to praise but gloomy, not exultant but insistent…To condemn or even to deplore them would…demonstrate…that our judgement is light-weight, undermining significantly the authority of the clergy, which is regarded – rightly – as unlettered bond-slaves to puerile literature in bad taste. 

“In the case of Graham Greene, his harsh and acerbic art touches the hearts of the least receptive and reminds them, however gloomy they may be, of the awe-inspiring presence of God and the poisonous bite of sin. He addresses those who are most distant and hostile – those whom we will never reach”.

Greene’s justification for what he had written was that the aim of the book was to oppose the power of the sacraments and the indestructibility of the Church on the one hand with, on the other, the merely temporal power of an essentially Communist state – revolutionary Mexico in the early  20th century.

In his introduction to a later edition of The Power and the Glory, Greene gives a telling personal account of this affair in which he wondered if there was any other authority in the world which would have treated a stubborn resister as gently as he was treated by the Catholic Church when he dug in his heels. He wrote:

.

The Archbishop of Westminster read me a letter from the Holy Office condemning my novel because it was “paradoxical” and “dealt with extraordinary circumstances.” The price of liberty, even within a Church, is eternal vigilance, but I wonder whether any of the totalitarian states … would have treated me as gently when I refused to revise the book on the casuistical ground that the copyright was in the hands of my publishers. There was no public condemnation, and the affair was allowed to drop into that peaceful oblivion which the Church wisely reserves for unimportant issues.

In a long article on this affair in The Atlantic, 2001, Peter Godman takes the story on into the 1960s. In July 1965 Greene had an audience with Montini, now Pope Paul VI. “He told the Pope that The Power and the Glory had been condemned by the Holy Office. According to Greene, the Pope asked, ‘Who condemned it?’ Greene replied, ‘Cardinal Pizzardo.’ Paul VI repeated the name with a wry smile and added, ‘Mr. Greene, some parts of your book are certain to offend some Catholics, but you should pay no attention to that.’” Godman commented:

“These sentences have intrigued me ever since I first read them, some years ago, in Greene’s Ways of Escape. The records of censorial investigations undertaken after the death of Leo XIII, in 1903, are in the archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and are not available to be consulted by outside scholars. In February of last year I sought and obtained an audience with the Congregation’s prefect, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. To my request that an exception be made to the rules, the reply was one word, uttered without hesitation: ‘Ja.’”

Godman’s explorations of those archives reveal much of the detail of the case and the denouement suggests the same judgment as Greene himself made on the ultimately wise conclusions reached despite the fallible and fumbling manoeuvres of some of the dramatis personae in the comedy.

“The mindset of Rome’s censors”, he says, “was not malevolent. It is difficult, however, to resist the conclusion that it was dim. Defensive about their authority (which they desired to assert even as they doubted its efficacy), and incapable of grasping the conceptual problems posed by Greene’s writing, they could be checked in their course only by intervention from above.” That was Montini’s intervention. 

Godman poses the question, why did Montini stand up for Greene? He describes him as “an intellectual whom John XXIII is said to have likened to Hamlet. Montini was alive to the problem of moral ambiguity. He was capable of discerning links between apparent contraries where less perceptive others saw none. 

“Montini was not only a reader of refined literary tastes but also a collector of literary manuscripts. Among them was the handwritten original of a booklet on Saint Dominic by Georges Bernanos, which ends with the sentence ‘There is only one sadness—not to be a saint.’ Montini treasured that work, echoes of which he cannot have failed to hear in The Power and the Glory. The words ‘He knew now that…there was only one thing that counted—to be a saint’ come at the very end of the penultimate chapter of Greene’s novel.”

Finally, Godman notes, three weeks after Greene had written his letter to Cardinal Pizzardo, the Secretary of State, Cardinal Ottaviani, scrawled on it that Cardinal Griffin had told him that the Holy Office should “understand and excuse” this right-thinking convert. And that is what was done.