emotional and spiritual interrogation

For about a month I’ve made my way through Eliot’s Four Quartets using Howard’s slim commentary, Dove Descending, as a guide. And Howard is a good guide – not too talkative, not prepared to explain ad nauseam as if you had no eyes of your own, but well informed, not pushing you along too quickly, and clearly in love with his subject.

I have seldom read a poem more historically specific in its imagery, (the first half of the 20th century). And yet there is in its power and subtlety, unflinching realism about human experience of precious life and inevitable death, penetrating truthfulness about fear and hope, anxiety and aspiration, time and eternity, an unnerving contemporary feel. It isn’t easy poetry – apart from the intellectual artfulness, the technical construction, the precision of language and subversion of form – it is the emotional and spiritual interrogation that takes place when the four poems are read in 2007. These quintessentially modern poems, accurately and specifically, diagnose the symptoms and trace the complexities of the post-modern worldview as it impacts on human existence. And Eliot does so profoundly informed by Christian tradition.

Time and timelessness, the centrality but elusiveness of human experience, the loss of the metaphysical structures of thought, the "chronological snobbishness" that thinks newest is truest and the accompanying suspicion of meta-narratives; these are some of Eliot’s themes. I know some of what he says doesn’t ‘work’, ‘connect’, with where we are today; what he’d have made of a world wired to the Web, welded to the mobile phone, dissolving into globalised standardisation – I’ve no idea. But if I want to even begin to examine life’s deepest foundations, his is one of the voices I would want to hear.  Why? Because he is honest about how hard Christian faith is, both to hold on to, and to relinquish – because we are caught in the love of the God who is caught in the love of the world.