NEW DIRECTIONS IN RELIGION AND LITERATURE SCHOLARSHIP 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 since the writer's seminal essay on "Religion and Literature" served as a main source of inspiration for the interdisciplinary focus of this journal at its inception.' In broad terms, the essay is a mandate for our particular type of scholarship: Eliot argues that religion and literature necessarily intersect, and that as readers and critics we limit our understanding of either to the extent that we attempt to study the latter while reducing the former out of the picture. The two disciplines can achieve a proper balance, he suggests, by ensuring that each respects the legitimate autonomy of the other. In its engagement with the true and the good, religion would consequently avoid the risk of falling into mere propaganda, whue literature's high devotion to beauty would not degenerate into mere aestheticism. And yet beyond the enunciation of general principles and the establishment of parameters, as can be said of much of Eliot's best criticism, it is an essay that is at its most elusive with regard to precisely those questions that it would seem to raise as most 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 our scholarly practices. In this case: aside from serving as proof of the complex relationship between its two defining terms, what ought scholarship in religion and literature actually look like in practice? Eliot says that religion offers "a definite ethical and theological standpoint" that must "complete" literary criticism.^ But what exactly is that definite standpoint? What separates the literary criteria from the religious, and how do we practice both appropriately? What ought to constitute our object of study, and why? Eliot says that "only literary standards" can determine what constitutes literature. But what does that mean for religion and literature when literature itself, as Eliot argues, is produced by a world that knows of Christianity only as "an anachronism"?^ In the details, of its actual argument, Eliot's essay still stands as a timely reminder about the nature and purpose of interdisciplinary criticism. To investigate the intersection of religion and literature is simultaneously a perennial 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 of view of the critic doing the investigating: In Eliot's case, that context is secu44.1 (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 literature to the fact of his religious conversion in the mid-1920s, confirmed by his baptism into the Church of England on June 29, 1927. Eliot himself is pardy responsible for the temptation. Although he distanced himself from the idea of a sudden or epiphanic turn to religion, Eliot nevertheless expressed his conversion as a turning point in his interests. In the preface to tiie 1928 (2"'') edition of The Sacred Wood, Eliot explains that the original 1920 coüection finds its coherence through a subject related, we might now say, to professionalization: foüowing the influence of Remy de Gourmont, he was interested in "the integrity of poetry," when poetry is considered as itself and not something else. Writing the second edition preface in March of 1928, less than one year after his conversion, he says that he has "passed on to another problem not touched upon in [The Sacred Wood]: that of the relation of poetry to the spiritual and social life of its time and of other times." His early and strictly secular work had not been left behind, but it was, "logicaüy and chronologicaüy.. .a beginning" point; his recent spiritual concerns signal a movement in a different direction (viü). A closer examination of the essays in the original 1920 edition of The Sacred Wood, however, shows abundant evidence that Eliot's pre-conversion work deals explicitly with "the relation of poetry to the spiritual and social life." How else to characterize Eliot's interrogation of the religious vision and its role in the poetics of the Commedia in "Dante," or of the visionary poetry of Blake (in the essay now titled "Blake," originaüy "The Naked Man")? Apart from the criticism, might not this be the central question of The Waste Land? In a variety of forms and from its earliest days, both Eliot's creative and critical work represents his engagement with—to invoke the motto of this journal—"the intersection of language and the ineffable." In sum, religion and literature provides a constant reference point for the development of Eliot's own thought, one that is uniquely prescient in its revelation of his own shifting point of view set against the backdrop of a broad canvas of historical and cultural determinants. And yet, once again at this pivotal interdisciplinary crossing, we find Eliot's work the least definite where it is the most suggestive. The impossibüity of reducing his sustained concern for religion and literature to any single position mirrors the mystery at the heart of our own critical engagement, and gives Eliot his enduring value. His body of work excels at exploring boundaries and sketching out uncharted territory without declaring such spacesfixed,at asking questions without insisting on final answers. He demands that we look, and that we keep 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 new directions for scholarship. The issues are never definitively addressed; the methods of inquiry are never set in stone. Such openness represents "the possibility of the possible." to invoke Aristotle on poetry: a fresh reading is always waiting there to be discovered, and his work also seems unusually useful as a sounding board for our own thinking-through of the relationship between religion and literature from different vantage points. As Eliot puts it in "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 influence on our common critical enterprise. In the range of their arguments, methods, and subjects the contributions to this forum offer eloquent testimony to the richness of Eliot's work for both emerging and more established scholars in the field. Each contributor points 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 critical reception of Eliot's conversion as a jumping-off point for exploring the implicit narrative of secularization by which modernist literature is read more broadly, and which Eliot evinces in an acute fashion. In response to this narrative, Woelfel explores the implications of the debates ongoing in a variety of fields—religious studies, philosophy, history, and sociology— about the nature and scope of secularization for our work as religion and literature scholars. In doing so, he calls for a more direct interrogation of the models of narrative and subjectivity through which we engage belief in 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-thinking the implications of the narratives we have written about religion in Eliot's life and work. Barry Spurr's "Anglo-Cadiolicism and the 'religious turn' in Eliot's poetry" interrogates critical reception of the central event of any narrative of Eliot's religious life, his conversion. Spurr argues that we must better understand Eliot's Anglo-Catholicism in its historicized context, and in the context of Eliot's own thought, than we have previously done. He shows convincingly that such contexts give the lie to the recurring temptation to view Eliot's conversion as a dramatic turn, a "revolutionary tita nuova in both his personal existence and his birth" leading to fulfillment in AngloCatholic belief Instead, he offers a better picture of what it really meant to be a convert to Anglo-Catholicism in Eliot's particular time and place. By extension he suggests that, as a narrative model, we might do better to follow the dominant leitmotif in Eliot's own work, the frustrated hero's journey. This journey extends in both directions across the particular moment of Eliot'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 admonition that in order to break new ground in the area of Eliot and religion critics 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 advice by returning to what Eliot actuaüy wrote. He accordingly offers an illustrative reading of the relation between Eliot and the litde-considered poet Robert Southweü against the narrative about Eliot's religious development presented in the influential work of Ronald Schuchard—touching on the metaphysicals, George Herbert, and Jesuitism—beginning with his editorship of The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (1993) and culminating in Eliot's Dark Angel {199%
Jewel Spears Brooker's '"Our First World': T S. Eliot and the Edenic Imagination" offers, in some senses, a counterpoint to Spurr's historicized conception of Eliot's unconsummated religious journey. It offers instead an entirely new critical framework for understanding Eliot's religious development retrospectively, and as a whole, taking Eliot as an exemplar of her concept of "the Edenic imagination, a religious version of the dialectical imagination." The Edenic imagination is a retrospective pattern that Brooker argues characterizes both particular works and Eliot's overaü life. She illustrates the pattern through a reading of the ways in which "Little Gidding" "loops back dialecticaüy" to the beginning of Four Quartets, and second, to Eliot's earliest unpublished prose. The result gives a shape to Eliot's work and life that, as Brooker says, is reflected in both ancient religions and "the landmarks of Western literature." John Morgenstern's "The 'Centre of Intensity': T. S. Eliot's Reassessment of Baudelaire in 1910-11 Paris" starts in Eliot's beginnings as a poet rather than his end. The piece iüustrates that promising avenues of research on Eliot and religion wiü also come from a deeper investigation of the poet's religious engagement in the time well before his conversion. Morgenstern analyzes the literary and cultural contexts converging in Eliot's reassessment of Baudelaire in the time surrounding his "Paris year" (1910-1911). Again using Schuchard as counterpoint, he convincingly demonstrates the ways in which the work and thought of Jacques Rivière deserve attention in Eliot's complex poetic-religious development. The resulting argument shows that, despite the wealth of extant scholarship on Eliot's inteüectual and literary sources and influences, much that has been overlooked remains to be discovered. To borrow from Eliot himself, it also shows that such discoveries bear fruit not as ends in themselves but because they add to our understanding of the matrix of the writer's work.
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Hazel Atkins's contribution, "Ways of Viewing Churches in The Waste Land and 'Little Gidding,'" looks to Eliot and religion both pre- and postconversion, but explores his work through a fresh angle: his intense and abiding interest in the history and architecture of church buildings. By examining the images of church buudings in The Waste Land and Eour Quartets Atkins shows how "it is possible to read Eliot's symbolic representations of churches very closely, uáng an interpretive method grounded in the concrete historical realities of the buildings themselves." Her reading shows these buildings to be significant markers through which we can track Eliot's understanding of the relationship between belief and the material world. In turn, she also shows that the real churches Eliot used in his work resonate with meanings which Eliot was aware of and which need to be historicized more thoroughly. Ben Lockerd's essay, "'Superficial Notions of Evolution': Eliot's Critique of Evolutionary Historiography," shows that to understand Eliot's mature religious poetry, even at its most apparently inward-looking, we must pay closer attention to the way it draws in and speaks to those concerns most central to "the popular mind." Proposing to gloss a single passage in "The Dry Salvages" in which Eliot speaks of "superficial notions of evolution," Lockerd situates Eliot in conversation with contemporary debates about evolutionary philosophy in the work of Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells, and the Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc. He triangulates EHot's position in order to show that, though Eliot was quiet about the work of Darwin, he nevertheless engaged—from the early pre-conversion days of his philosophy studies—with popular interpretation of the work of Darwin and others who extrapolated evolutionary theory to spheres in which it had no proper authority, using it to undergird a myth of inevitable human progress. The contributions to this forum hopefully open up paths in Eliot studies that await further critical exploration. It is important to note, in closing, that the fruitfulness of the promising approaches suggested here will doubtless be greatly enhanced once the complete materials in the Eliot archives become available to scholars. Fortunately, an unprecedented scholarly and publishing project—made possible by and coordinated between the Estate of T. S. Eliot, Faber & Faber, The Institute of English Studies, University of London, the AHRC, the Hodson Trust, Johns Hopkins and Emory universities, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Texas (plus a host of individual scholars)—has been underway for some six-plus years to edit and publish new editions of Eliot's published and unpublished writings. We have just seen the tip of the iceberg: last year volume two of Eliot's Letters was published under the editorship of Valerie Ehot and Hugh 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 of the Letters (1926-1927) has just been published this September, from series editor John Haffenden; the seven-volume Complete Prose, under the general editorship of Ronald Schuchard; the two-volume Complete Poems, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue; and the Complete Plays, again edited by John Haffenden. The impact that such efforts will make on future research in Eliot cannot possibly be underestimated. For researchers who might feel daunted, or perhaps just exhausted, by the staggering volume of scholarship that already exists on Eliot's work, the thought of gaining full access to all of the primary material represents a truly refreshing prospect for further innovation. Of course, such new materials wül only go as far as scholars are willing to push them. This forum humbly presents its own sense of what some new directions may be; but, more than that, it represents the promise that Eliot's work and thought wül be a continued source of inspiration and of critical conversation.
NOTES 1. See John J. McDonald, "Religion and Literature," Religion & Literature 16.1 (^'Vinter 1984): 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), 97-106 Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Eliot's poems and plays throughout the forum refer to 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 printed works 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 of Culture, where he emphasizes the point that Christianity played a foundational role in the formation 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 a seminal 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 report of the Word of God."
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