purifying words to revive images: sensory intimations of god in eliot's four quartets

8/9/2019 Purifying Words to Revive Images: Sensory Intimations of God in Eliot's Four Quartets

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j o u r n a l o f u n d e r g r a d u a t e r e s e a r c h

Purifying Words to Revive Images:Sensory Intimations of God in EliotsFour Quartets

MOLLY KRING

Purifying Words to Revive Images explores how .S. Eliot

draws on Eastern religious practices to approach a God beyond logic

without once mentioning his name. Upon Wittgensteins declara-

tion that human language cannot touch the divine and Nietzsches

pronouncement that God is dead, a gap opened between the logical

and the spiritual. alk of God largely left the academic scene and the

written word was left to only hint at the divine, for words, as hu-

man-constructed forms, were deemed necessarily inadequate for the

communication of God. Eliot addresses this issue by unintentionally

aligning himself with a neo-Tomist 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.


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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

The simplicity of Eliots language, however, has led literary critic Shira Wolosky to term

Eliot a linguistic ascetic who is part of the apophatic tradition.

Influenced by the French Symbolist literary

movementespecially Mallarm, who emphasized the sound of each word in poems and left the

meaning intentionally ambiguousT.S. Eliots 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 thoughtin particular with Jacques Maritains model of the

soulto 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.

2 This tradition renounces any


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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 poems meaning lies between or beyond its literal content.

When the neo-Thomist features of Eliots 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 ofLittle

Gidding to create a new spiritual whole where the fire and rose are one challenges Woloskys

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 Eliots 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 Eliots 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 Eliots poetics and consequently falls into the

cataphatic tradition, for Eliots poetry, like the Zen koan, builds up spare images that point

toward God through both the intellect and senses.


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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 movements 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 thehard benches of the court of Reason as it is called into session. God is brought beforethe 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 courts approval. In

such a world, from Anselms point of view, God is already dead, even if you concludethat 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 Eliots 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.


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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 thatpersonal events that

must be dealt with in the privacy of churches and homes. Eliots 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

Eliots 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 all4

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

Eliots challenge in communicating God is complicated by the fact that the language he

employs creates the gap in the first place. By Anselms 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

Wittgensteins


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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. TheTractatus 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 higherfrom the perverting, all-too-human encroaches of language. It is not philistinism, then,

that informs Wittgensteins 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 whatcan 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.

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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.

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.

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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 poets invocation of

these imagesa waterfall, children playing in an apple tree, and waves in the seaevokes 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


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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

Moreover, the first word in every line ofFour 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

Eliots 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 readers 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

Such is the case in the

aforementioned passage.


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are not only the objective correlatives, but the individual words of which they consist. Within

Eliots 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


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transubstantiated; in face of Wittgensteins 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.

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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 andspirit 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.

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:

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And this is precisely what Eliots poetry does. The ideas of time and love put forth in Four

Quartets appeal to Reasonperhaps this is why Eliots 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 Eliots 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
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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 Maritains soul and Eliots 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 ofFour Quartets is most pervasive in the musical structure of the

poem. Influenced by Mallarm and the French Symbolist movements 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, Mallarm 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,


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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 Valerys The Art of Poetry,

Eliot writes, Music itself may be conceived as striving towards an unattainable timelessness.16

Words move, music moves

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 poems structure can transport words from the realm of the real to that of the

supernatural:

Only in time; but that which is only livingCan only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reachThe 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 partstraditionally the

violin, viola, cello and basscoming 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 poets language. Each quartet is characterized by a strict


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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 ofFour

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 readers emotions, just as a string quartet would.

III. Raising Paradoxes

Eliots 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 ofFour 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


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dominant symbols, Eliot seeks to merge the rational Western and intentionally ambiguous

Eastern thoughts.

Eliots use of paradoxes to illustrate God harkens to Simone Weils notion of finding

truth in contradiction. Arguing that contradiction is necessary to all Truth, she writes, The

contradictions the mind comes up againstthese are the only realities: they are the criterion of

the real.18

The poet may juxtapose incompatible images so that the mind will not rest on anysingle one, but see through all of them to what lies beyond; in somewhat familiar fashionwords may be detached from their normal referents and have their senses modified by

their relationships with those which surround them. Mallarm uses the analogy of

music, which can suggest without tying the mind to irrelevant peculiarities, and Symonsechoes him in describing his best poetry: every word is a jewel...every image is a

symbol, and the whole poem is visible music.

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:

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Eliots 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.


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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 Eliots poetry, the paradoxes force us to focus on

the poems 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 Eliots poetry can be called nonsensical, I do think the Quartets obfuscate an

understanding of a rational story within the poetry.

Eliots 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 Eliots 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


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reader back to the pure unarticulated and unexplained ground of direct experience, an idea

which has Heideggerian undertones.24

Such close attention [in Four Quartets] to the fragments of meaning become like the no-

sense, not-nonsense, of the great Zen Koans. Any careful reading, like Eliots own in his

recording, can render problematic any commonsense or ontological, perhaps moreexactly, 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 over-determined, the subject, verb, object pattern by which the English language is usually

spoken.

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:

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 Maritains conception of the

unconscious along with the sensory, whereas koans avoid logic completely. Therefore, the

crossover between Zen koans and Eliots poetry lies in their wish to go beyond the realms of

language to communicate a complex divine presence.

Eliots Four Quartets also bear a striking resemblance to Murrays 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, Eliots 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


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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 thedogmatic 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 Vittozs lessons made a mark upon

Eliots poetry. She writes that we hear an echo both of Vittozs 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

All of Eliots techniques thus far discussednamely, objective correlatives, music and

paradoxestablish Four Quartets as a work that engages faculties outside the realm of logic;

however, they tell little of Eliots personal theology. I argue that Eliots personal theology can be

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 Eliots connection to Indic thought and

meditative practices are quite well-established, it is not surprising that we see echoes of it in his

poetry.


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considered cataphatic. Eliots notion of time as cyclical is essential to holding this position. The

circular nature of the quartets themselves and Eliots 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 Eliots 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 Eliots 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, Eliots 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 Eliots 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, Eliots 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, Eliots 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 Eliots 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 ones 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 Maritains 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. Eliots 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 Woloskys argument that Eliot is a mystical ascetic who jettisons all

attachments to arrive at an idea of God.35

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.

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.

36

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

This snowballing of previous images to create a new

picture of unity is symbolic of Eliots 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.


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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. Eliots 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 ofFour Quartets.

Wolosky argues that Eliot is undeniably an apophatic writer who draws on mystic

traditions: Eliots negative way, that is, follows Johns [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

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

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 Woloskys 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:

When the last of earth left to discover


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Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest riverThe voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillnessBetween two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, alwaysA condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well andAll 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. Eliots 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 Eliots 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 ofFour 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. Eliots 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 Eliots 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 ofFour Quartets, Eliot suggests that the only way back to the rose garden

(Eden), is to purify with fire both ones 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

Engelmann has written that Wittgensteins 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 ofmisconstructions. Intimation of the divine, rather than talk of the divine, will be the heart

of wordless faith. Wittgensteins remark that the religion of the future will have to beextremely ascetic; and by that I dont mean just going without food and drink. Thereligion 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.

Clack

writes:

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, Eliots 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 Nietzsches proclamation of Gods 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 throughthe 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 Eliots

cataphatic tendencies and the shortsightedness of Woloskys 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.


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purifying words to revive images: sensory intimations of god in eliot's four quartets

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