NEW DIRECTIONS IN RELIGION AND LITERATURESCHOLARSHIP ON T. S. ELIOT

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INTRODUCTION: "IN OUR BEGINNING"

Dominic Manganiello and Graig Woelfel

It seems appropriate to devote a forum to the work of T. S. Eliot sincethe writer's seminal essay on "Religion and Literature" served as a mainsource of inspiration for the interdisciplinary focus of this journal at itsinception.' In broad terms, the essay is a mandate for our particular typeof scholarship: Eliot argues that religion and literature necessarily intersect,and that as readers and critics we limit our understanding of either to theextent that we attempt to study the latter while reducing the former out ofthe picture. The two disciplines can achieve a proper balance, he suggests,by ensuring that each respects the legitimate autonomy of the other. In itsengagement with the true and the good, religion would consequently avoidthe risk of falling into mere propaganda, whue literature's high devotion tobeauty would not degenerate into mere aestheticism. And yet beyond theenunciation of general principles and the establishment of parameters, ascan be said of much of Eliot's best criticism, it is an essay that is at its mostelusive with regard to precisely those questions that it would seem to raise asmost imperative. To say nothing of his case for a Christian cultural reform,this is certainly true of those questions that would be most relevant to ourscholarly practices. In this case: aside from serving as proof of the complexrelationship between its two defining terms, what ought scholarship in re-ligion and literature actually look like in practice? Eliot says that religionoffers "a definite ethical and theological standpoint" that must "complete"literary criticism.^ But what exactly is that definite standpoint? What sepa-rates the literary criteria from the religious, and how do we practice bothappropriately? What ought to constitute our object of study, and why? Eliotsays that "only literary standards" can determine what constitutes literature.But what does that mean for religion and literature when literature itself, asEliot argues, is produced by a world that knows of Christianity only as "ananachronism"?^

In the details, of its actual argument, Eliot's essay still stands as a timelyreminder about the nature and purpose of interdisciplinary criticism. Toinvestigate the intersection of religion and literature is simultaneously a pe-rennial task of criticism and one that uniquely reveals, the greater historical'and cultural context in which it is situated, as well as the particular point ofview of the critic doing the investigating: In Eliot's case, that context is secu-

44.1 (Spring 2012)

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larization, and that point of view is grounded in Eliot's Anglo-Catholicism.As such, it is tempting to attribute Eliot's interest in religion and literatureto the fact of his religious conversion in the mid-1920s, confirmed by hisbaptism into the Church of England on June 29, 1927. Eliot himself ispardy responsible for the temptation. Although he distanced himself fromthe idea of a sudden or epiphanic turn to religion, Eliot nevertheless ex-pressed his conversion as a turning point in his interests. In the preface totiie 1928 (2"'') edition of The Sacred Wood, Eliot explains that the original1920 coüection finds its coherence through a subject related, we might nowsay, to professionalization: foüowing the influence of Remy de Gourmont,he was interested in "the integrity of poetry," when poetry is considered asitself and not something else. Writing the second edition preface in Marchof 1928, less than one year after his conversion, he says that he has "passedon to another problem not touched upon in [The Sacred Wood]: that of therelation of poetry to the spiritual and social life of its time and of othertimes." His early and strictly secular work had not been left behind, but itwas, "logicaüy and chronologicaüy.. .a beginning" point; his recent spiritualconcerns signal a movement in a different direction (viü).

A closer examination of the essays in the original 1920 edition of TheSacred Wood, however, shows abundant evidence that Eliot's pre-conversionwork deals explicitly with "the relation of poetry to the spiritual and sociallife." How else to characterize Eliot's interrogation of the religious visionand its role in the poetics of the Commedia in "Dante," or of the visionarypoetry of Blake (in the essay now titled "Blake," originaüy "The NakedMan")? Apart from the criticism, might not this be the central question ofThe Waste Land? In a variety of forms and from its earliest days, both Eliot'screative and critical work represents his engagement with—to invoke themotto of this journal—"the intersection of language and the ineffable."In sum, religion and literature provides a constant reference point for thedevelopment of Eliot's own thought, one that is uniquely prescient in itsrevelation of his own shifting point of view set against the backdrop of abroad canvas of historical and cultural determinants. And yet, once again atthis pivotal interdisciplinary crossing, we find Eliot's work the least definitewhere it is the most suggestive. The impossibüity of reducing his sustainedconcern for religion and literature to any single position mirrors the mysteryat the heart of our own critical engagement, and gives Eliot his enduringvalue. His body of work excels at exploring boundaries and sketching outuncharted territory without declaring such spaces fixed, at asking questionswithout insisting on final answers. He demands that we look, and that wekeep coming back to look again more closely, as if for the first time.

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This, too, makes the Eliot corpus a continual site for exploring newdirections for scholarship. The issues are never definitively addressed; themethods of inquiry are never set in stone. Such openness represents "thepossibility of the possible." to invoke Aristotle on poetry: a fresh reading isalways waiting there to be discovered, and his work also seems unusuallyuseful as a sounding board for our own thinking-through of the relationshipbetween religion and literature from different vantage points. As Eliot puts itin "The Perfect Critic," "there is no method, except to be very intelligent."If we seek to fulfill this criterion, then we can call Eliot a lasting influenceon our common critical enterprise.

In the range of their arguments, methods, and subjects the contributionsto this forum offer eloquent testimony to the richness of Eliot's work forboth emerging and more established scholars in the field. Each contributorpoints to a new direction that future criticism on Eliot might profitably take.

Craig Woelfel's "T. S. Eliot and Our Beliefs about Belief" takes our criti-cal reception of Eliot's conversion as a jumping-off point for exploring theimplicit narrative of secularization by which modernist literature is readmore broadly, and which Eliot evinces in an acute fashion. In response tothis narrative, Woelfel explores the implications of the debates ongoing ina variety of fields—religious studies, philosophy, history, and sociology—about the nature and scope of secularization for our work as religion andliterature scholars. In doing so, he calls for a more direct interrogation ofthe models of narrative and subjectivity through which we engage beliefin modernity, the ways that we define the "religion" half of our discipline,and the questions that we ask about belief

Woelfel's piece is not alone in insisting on the necessity of re-thinkingthe implications of the narratives we have written about religion in Eliot'slife and work. Barry Spurr's "Anglo-Cadiolicism and the 'religious turn' inEliot's poetry" interrogates critical reception of the central event of anynarrative of Eliot's religious life, his conversion. Spurr argues that we mustbetter understand Eliot's Anglo-Catholicism in its historicized context, andin the context of Eliot's own thought, than we have previously done. Heshows convincingly that such contexts give the lie to the recurring temptationto view Eliot's conversion as a dramatic turn, a "revolutionary tita nuova inboth his personal existence and his birth" leading to fulfillment in Anglo-Catholic belief Instead, he offers a better picture of what it really meant tobe a convert to Anglo-Catholicism in Eliot's particular time and place. Byextension he suggests that, as a narrative model, we might do better to followthe dominant leitmotif in Eliot's own work, the frustrated hero's journey.This journey extends in both directions across the particular moment ofEliot's conversion such diat the onset of Christian belief can hardly be said

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to represent a dramatic break, or the seed of an ultimate fulfiüment.Lee Oser's essay, "Back to the Poetry," opens with the provocative admo-

nition that in order to break new ground in the area of Eliot and religioncritics must necessarüy be aware—and perhaps be wary—of the received"official portraits" of Eliot offered by the work of scholars and editors past.To regain a clear view of the man and the poet Oser foüows his own adviceby returning to what Eliot actuaüy wrote. He accordingly offers an illustra-tive reading of the relation between Eliot and the litde-considered poetRobert Southweü against the narrative about Eliot's religious developmentpresented in the influential work of Ronald Schuchard—touching on themetaphysicals, George Herbert, and Jesuitism—beginning with his editor-ship of The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (1993) and culminating in Eliot'sDark Angel {199%

Jewel Spears Brooker's '"Our First World': T S. Eliot and the EdenicImagination" offers, in some senses, a counterpoint to Spurr's historicizedconception of Eliot's unconsummated religious journey. It offers instead anentirely new critical framework for understanding Eliot's religious develop-ment retrospectively, and as a whole, taking Eliot as an exemplar of herconcept of "the Edenic imagination, a religious version of the dialecticalimagination." The Edenic imagination is a retrospective pattern that Brookerargues characterizes both particular works and Eliot's overaü life. She illus-trates the pattern through a reading of the ways in which "Little Gidding""loops back dialecticaüy" to the beginning of Four Quartets, and second, toEliot's earliest unpublished prose. The result gives a shape to Eliot's workand life that, as Brooker says, is reflected in both ancient religions and "thelandmarks of Western literature."

John Morgenstern's "The 'Centre of Intensity': T. S. Eliot's Reassessmentof Baudelaire in 1910-11 Paris" starts in Eliot's beginnings as a poet ratherthan his end. The piece iüustrates that promising avenues of research onEliot and religion wiü also come from a deeper investigation of the poet'sreligious engagement in the time well before his conversion. Morgensternanalyzes the literary and cultural contexts converging in Eliot's reassessmentof Baudelaire in the time surrounding his "Paris year" (1910-1911). Againusing Schuchard as counterpoint, he convincingly demonstrates the ways inwhich the work and thought of Jacques Rivière deserve attention in Eliot'scomplex poetic-religious development. The resulting argument shows that,despite the wealth of extant scholarship on Eliot's inteüectual and literarysources and influences, much that has been overlooked remains to be discov-ered. To borrow from Eliot himself, it also shows that such discoveries bearfruit not as ends in themselves but because they add to our understandingof the matrix of the writer's work.

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Hazel Atkins's contribution, "Ways of Viewing Churches in The WasteLand and 'Little Gidding,'" looks to Eliot and religion both pre- and post-conversion, but explores his work through a fresh angle: his intense andabiding interest in the history and architecture of church buildings. By ex-amining the images of church buudings in The Waste Land and Eour QuartetsAtkins shows how "it is possible to read Eliot's symbolic representations ofchurches very closely, uáng an interpretive method grounded in the concretehistorical realities of the buildings themselves." Her reading shows thesebuildings to be significant markers through which we can track Eliot's un-derstanding of the relationship between belief and the material world. Inturn, she also shows that the real churches Eliot used in his work resonatewith meanings which Eliot was aware of and which need to be historicizedmore thoroughly.

Ben Lockerd's essay, "'Superficial Notions of Evolution': Eliot's Critiqueof Evolutionary Historiography," shows that to understand Eliot's maturereligious poetry, even at its most apparently inward-looking, we must paycloser attention to the way it draws in and speaks to those concerns mostcentral to "the popular mind." Proposing to gloss a single passage in "TheDry Salvages" in which Eliot speaks of "superficial notions of evolution,"Lockerd situates Eliot in conversation with contemporary debates aboutevolutionary philosophy in the work of Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells, andthe Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc. He triangulates EHot's position inorder to show that, though Eliot was quiet about the work of Darwin, henevertheless engaged—from the early pre-conversion days of his philosophystudies—with popular interpretation of the work of Darwin and otherswho extrapolated evolutionary theory to spheres in which it had no properauthority, using it to undergird a myth of inevitable human progress.

The contributions to this forum hopefully open up paths in Eliot studiesthat await further critical exploration. It is important to note, in closing,that the fruitfulness of the promising approaches suggested here will doubt-less be greatly enhanced once the complete materials in the Eliot archivesbecome available to scholars. Fortunately, an unprecedented scholarly andpublishing project—made possible by and coordinated between the Estateof T. S. Eliot, Faber & Faber, The Institute of English Studies, Universityof London, the AHRC, the Hodson Trust, Johns Hopkins and Emoryuniversities, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Texas(plus a host of individual scholars)—has been underway for some six-plusyears to edit and publish new editions of Eliot's published and unpublishedwritings. We have just seen the tip of the iceberg: last year volume twoof Eliot's Letters was published under the editorship of Valerie Ehot andHugh Haughton, along with a revised edition of volume one (1898-1922).

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Volume 2, in over 800 pages, takes us only to the year 1925. Volume 3 ofthe Letters (1926-1927) has just been published this September, from serieseditor John Haffenden; the seven-volume Complete Prose, under the generaleditorship of Ronald Schuchard; the two-volume Complete Poems, edited byChristopher Ricks and Jim McCue; and the Complete Plays, again edited byJohn Haffenden. The impact that such efforts will make on future researchin Eliot cannot possibly be underestimated. For researchers who might feeldaunted, or perhaps just exhausted, by the staggering volume of scholarshipthat already exists on Eliot's work, the thought of gaining full access to allof the primary material represents a truly refreshing prospect for furtherinnovation.

Of course, such new materials wül only go as far as scholars are willingto push them. This forum humbly presents its own sense of what some newdirections may be; but, more than that, it represents the promise that Eliot'swork and thought wül be a continued source of inspiration and of criticalconversation.

NOTES

1. See John J. McDonald, "Religion and Literature," Religion & Literature 16.1 (̂ 'Vinter1984): 61-71.

2. Eliot's argument is developed over the course of his essay. "Religion and Literature"can be found in his Selected Prose ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt, 1975), 97-106Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Eliot's poems and plays throughout the forum referto published versions in The Complete Poems and Plays:] 909-1950, (New York: Harcourt Brace&Company), [1971] 1980. For references to The M&ffeZflM¿, an abnormality in Eliot's printedworks in the sense that it is printed with line numbers, both page and line are provided. .

3. Eliot later tackled some of these pivotal questions in Notes Towards the Definition ofCulture, where he emphasizes the point that Christianity played a foundational role in theformation of a common culture in the West. Even the skepticism of a Voltaire or a Nietzsche,Eliot reckons, was itself a byproduct of Christian religion. The Bible, moreover, exerted aseminal literary influence on Western culture, as he claims in "Religion and Literature,""not because it has been considered literature, but because it has been considered the reportof the Word of God."

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