Paul Murray

Mysticism and Music

‘[M]ystical illumination’, Eliot remarked in March 1933, ‘is a vision which may be accompanied by the realization that you will never be able to communicate it to anyone else, or even by the realization that when it is past you will not be able to recall it yourself.’1 It is, in other words, an event of the spirit as deeply mysterious and elusive as it is real. But how then is it possible, one can ask, for a fully authentic mystic, or for someone graced by an experience of a mystical kind, to be also a great poet? Will he not tend to demean in some way and to betray the transcendent gift he has received by straining to express it in words? And on what basis in any case can he hope to give tongue to that which is in itself ineffable — particularly when, as it would appear, only a few broken fragments remain in his memory of the original experience?

The Ascetic Vision

When it was first published in 1940 ‘East Coker’ was considered by many critics to be one of Eliot’s most considerable poetic achievements. But this view was not shared by everyone. There was, for example, the following assessment made by an anonymous reviewer in the pages of The Times Literary Supplement: ‘Mr Eliot is disdainful of many things, of most things. … Where Vaughan, whose days were as troubled as our own and little less violent, saw eternity the other night and bright shoots of everlastingness, Mr Eliot sees only the dark.’1 Unfortunately, many of the disagreements concerning ‘East Coker’ were, in the beginning, largely ideological. On the one hand, those critics who had sympathy with Eliot’s bleak vision of the via negativa were inclined to express an almost tribal enthusiasm for the poem. On the other hand, the quite deliberate and unembarrassed expression in the poem of Eliot’s Catholic philosophy of disillusion — what the critic George Orwell called Eliot’s ’melancholy faith’ — did not win much approbation from the more left-wing and agnostic critics.

The Language of Patriotism: Rudyard Kipling and Rupert Brooke

The phrase ‘spiritual patriots’, originally coined by Evelyn Underhill in her 1912 Introduction to The Cloud of Unknowing,1 is perhaps, the most helpful phrase to use when describing the patriotism of someone like T. S. Eliot. But it can also be misleading. Eliot’s ‘spiritual’ patriotism did not prevent him, for example, from an immediate and active involvement in the war effort. And, after 1938, he became, if anything, more concerned than ever with social and political issues. But the full integrity of a civilised life in England (or, perhaps, one should say rather, the possibility of such integrity) Eliot saw as being threatened by the general collapse of religious and spiritual values throughout Europe. The war, in his view, with all its attendant horror, was but the merest symptom of this collapse. Eliot’s immediate aim was ‘to find new spiritual energies to regenerate and vitalize our sick society’.2 This search led him back to the sources of European wisdom and most notably, at one period, to the English medieval tradition of mysticism.3Evelyn Underhill wrote in 1912: nThe little family of mystical treatises which is known to stu- dents as ‘the Cloud of Unknowing group’, deserves more attention than it has hitherto received from English lovers of mysticism; for it represents the first expression in our tongue of that great mystic tradition of the Christian Neoplatonists which gathered up, remade, and ‘salted with Christ’s salt’ all that was best in the spiritual wisdom of the ancient world.4

The Influence of St John of the Cross

The name of St John of the Cross first occurs in notes which Eliot made when he was still a student at Harvard from 1908 to 1914.1 But it was not. until about ten years later, in the period immediately preceding his conversion, that Eliot began seriously to read the work of the Spanish Carmelite.2 At first, although he was greatly impressed by the mystical teachings of St John, Eliot was by no means convinced that St John was a great poet. This judgment was based on a comparison which he made between St Johns work and the mystical poetry of Dante.

Eliot in Meditation

The kind of knowledge Eliot derived from his reading of mystical philosophy and literature should not, I think, be understood as something merely abstract or intellectual. It was a knowledge that affected in some degree his entire sensibility. The evidence for this claim is in the meditative poetry Eliot has written. But one can also learn something from a few absorbing pages Eliot composed as a ‘Preface’ to an anthology of devotional literature entitled Thoughts for Meditation: A Way to Recovery from Within.1 Eliot’s immediate subject in these pages is the question of how best to read the work of spiritual authors. First of all, he makes a number of comments on the difficulties involved in the reading of other kinds of literature such as philosophy and poetry: nPhilosophy is difficult, unless we discipline our minds for it; the full appreciation of poetry is difficult for those who have not trained their sensibility by years of attentive reading. But devotional reading is the most difficult of all, because it requires an application, not only of the mind, not only of the sensibility, but of the whole being.2

Mysticism and Incarnation

Shortly before the third and most controversial Quartet was published, Eliot sent a draft-copy of the work to a few of his friends and invited them to read and to study it. One of these friends, Geoffrey Faber, after he had read carefully through the poem, asked Eliot what precise meaning was intended in the poem’s final section by the use of the theological term ‘Incarnation’. The word occurs at the climax of a paragraph also noteworthy for the fine evocation by the poet of certain small experiences of illumination.

The Brahmin and Buddhist Influence

On one occasion when Eliot was discussing the influence from outside Europe upon European literature he remarked: nIn the literature of Asia is great poetry. There is also profound wisdom and some very difficult metaphysics…. Long ago I studied the Indian languages, and while I was chiefly interested at that time in Philosophy, I read a little poetry too; and I know that my own poetry shows the influence of Indian thought and sensibility.1

Mysticism and Magic

On 19 January 1935, shortly before Eliot began work on ‘Burnt Norton’, he made public something of his own attitude to magic by quoting with approval Fr Herbert Thurston’s statement that ‘for the mass of mankind spiritualistic practices are dangerous and undesirable’.1 Six years later in his third Quartet, ‘The Dry Salvages’, Eliot again repeated this judgment and gave it the stamp of his own moral and poetic authority.

The Philosophy of Stillness

Basic lack of information concerning mysticism is perhaps one of the main reasons why Eliot’s mystical attitude, or his philosophy of mysticism, has not always been regarded by critics as fundamental to the inner composition of Four Quartets. The tendency in general is to imagine that a work of mystical literature — if it is really authentic — will be characterised by an intense erotic-devotional atmosphere. ‘[T]he erotic relation between man and woman’, writes Dr H. Servotte, ‘… is the common analogy [used by the mystics in their writings] for the relation between man and God.’1 The fact, therefore, that ‘in Four Quartets eroticism is conspicuously absent’ encourages Servotte to conclude that both the end and the starting-point of Four Quartets are different from those of ordinary mystical literature.