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T.S. Eliot's extraordinary journey of faith

Barry Spurr ABC Religion and Ethics 12 Oct 2011
Window of St Stephens, Gloucester Road, London

A window of St Stephens, Gloucester Road, London, where T.S. Eliot was the church warden.


When Virginia Woolf - T.S. Eliot's fellow Modernist and patron - learnt of her friend's conversion to Christianity in 1927 (and not just any form of Christianity, but the highest of Anglican modes, Anglo-Catholicism) she predicted that he would "drop his Christianity with his wife, as one might empty the fishbones after the herring."

While she was right about his wife - the increasingly deranged Vivienne, from whom Eliot was soon to separate himself forever - Woolf could not have been more mistaken about his Christianity, which endured until his death in 1965.

Stephen Spender recalled that Woolf needled Eliot about his religion: "Did he go to church? Did he hand round the plate? Oh really! Then what did he experience when he prayed?"

For the Bloomsbury Group (of which Woolf was a leading member and with which Eliot had had some involvement in the years after the Great War) religion of any kind was anathema. Yet Eliot had embraced a creed particularly focused on orthodox doctrine about faith and morals and with a rigorous regime of spiritual and liturgical observance.

Anglo-Catholicism was then in its heyday and prided itself on its contrast with more easy-going, mainstream Anglicanism. Eliot's new faith represented everything that people such as Lytton Strachey (another friend of the poet and of Woolf) were fighting against in their repudiation of Victorianism and conventionality of belief and behaviour in all its forms.

The poet of The Waste Land (1922) and "The Hollow Men" (1925) had recently given profound and confronting expression to the nihilism of his generation (and in aesthetic forms which also indicated an iconoclastic repudiation of the past). How could it be that Eliot, within a few years of the composition of such radical works, had so turned his back on these convictions to be baptized and confirmed?

To understand Eliot's movement to the position he adopted in maturity in 1927, and from which he never wavered, it is essential to appreciate some of the characteristics of his preceding four decades: in the background of his family (generations of distinguished American Unitarians), his subsequent education and intellectual and cultural development, more recent events in his personal life and, beneath all of this, fundamental traits of his personality and his response to the modern world.

All have bearing, in various ways, on his conversion - which is itself a problematic term, in his case, as it suggests a life-changing moment when all previous religious affiliations, reservations and patterns of behaviour are cast aside and the new life of faith is embraced.

Eliot was highly skeptical of such Damascus-road experiences which he suspected had more to do with emotion than thought and smacked of evangelical revivalism far removed from the kind of Christianity to which he was drawn.

The Eliot family's nineteenth-century Bostonian Unitarianism had had its distant roots in Calvinism, but that strict theology had been so watered down, over the centuries, that its key doctrines (such as belief in Original Sin, election to eternal redemption and damnation, the Trinity, the sacraments of baptism and communion, the idea of Jesus as the incarnate Son of God, his miracles and resurrection, and so on) had all been jettisoned, while the puritan morality had remained and good works in this world had filled the void created by the evacuation of the otherworldly life of prayer and spiritual discipline.

Eliot always recognized the formidable force for social good (especially in education) of the American Unitarian tradition and realized that his own somewhat puritanical and fastidious moral view had its roots in the Calvinist heritage of Unitarian rectitude.

But he found, by the time of his undergraduate years, that the threadbare theology of Unitarianism, the provinciality of its culture and the parochialism of its moralism were dreadfully inadequate - intellectually, culturally and spiritually - for the kind of systematic, authoritative rule of life and explanation of human existence for which he was yearning.

As a student of philosophy at Harvard (and, subsequently, as a postgraduate both there and, briefly, at Oxford in the period 1909 to 1914) he searched widely among a variety of belief systems, in eastern religions as well as in the western tradition, for a creed worthy of assent and practice.

His family had hoped that Eliot would become an academic philosopher. But the years of research in pursuit of this goal were also spent in developing his more deep-seated literary interests and particularly his poetic creativity.

Time spent in Paris in 1910-11, when he was attending lectures at the College de France by Henri Bergson on the philosophy of time (which always remained an interest - Four Quartets, written thirty years later, is an extended poetic meditation on time and timelessness) introduced Eliot to the innovative work of the French "symbolist" poets, as well as to the breadth and depth of European cultural and literary traditions.

During this Parisian period, Eliot attended High Mass at the Madeleine, drawn to the dramatic elements of the celebration of the ancient liturgy. Such Europeanism further encouraged Eliot to shake off the provinciality of his Americanism, and he recognized that the roots of that European tradition were in its Catholic Christianity, with its doctrinal rigour, historical continuity and centuries-old devotional traditions.

These resonated too with his classicism (not to mention his revulsion from romanticism). Some of Eliot's most famous early poems, such as "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," belong to this period.

Completing his doctoral thesis on the idealist philosophy of F.H. Bradley, Eliot found that his research convinced him of three things: that he did not subscribe to Bradley's Idealism, that he did not want a career as an academic philosopher, and that he did not want to return to America in that (or any other) guise.

By 1915 he had settled in London and had married an Englishwoman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, the marriage being a troubled mismatch from the beginning. Their problems were aggravated by the stress of living in London as the Great War worsened.

Eliot's sense of the laying waste of the western culture that he admired was also intensifying, to receive its most memorable expression in The Waste Land a few years later.

As Eliot had decided to remain in London and pursue a literary career, he was faced with a formidable dilemma.

His conviction had increased that only orthodox Catholic Christianity presented a persuasive solution to the sufferings, personal and cultural, of the post-War world, but the Roman Catholic Church in England, in those days much more so than today, was - as he put it - merely a sect.

With his loathing of sectarianism and his convictions that the culture and faith of a people should be intertwined, he was drawn to the Church of England, but recognized, of course, that that body had an unsatisfactory mixture of Protestantism and Catholicism in its character and observances, being, from the viewpoint of the Catholic Church at least, not Catholic at all.

Eliot's solution was to align himself with the Anglo-Catholic movement in the Church of England which believed that that Church was part of the universal Catholic Church from which it had been regrettably separated at the Reformation (while still retaining valid orders and sacraments - a view rejected, of course, by Rome) and to which it was aspiring to return in full Catholic communion.

So, a combination of several negative elements led Eliot in this decade (1915-25) to focus his attention, increasingly, on the Catholic faith, in its Anglican form: there was his intensifying personal suffering in a failing marriage, a sense of cultural dissolution in the Great War, the failure to find consolation in philosophy and wide reading in such as the eastern religions, and a long-standing disillusionment with Unitarianism and Protestantism in all its varieties (either as lacking doctrinal and cultural substance or relying too heavily on individual perceptions of the divine at the expense of the teachings of centuries of learning and tradition).

Ironically in the midst of much disappointment and despair, Eliot was writing some of his most distinguished poetry. But it was his conviction that poetry characteristically comes out of suffering. So, too, did his faith.

Barry Spurr is Professor of Poetry at the University of Sydney. His most recent book is "Anglo-Catholic in Religion": T.S. Eliot and Christianity (Lutterworth, 2010).

Comments (8)

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  • D Bull :

    12 Oct 2011 11:47:06pm

    Great Article!

    I just wrote a little undergraduate essay on 'The Waste land' basically arguing that it was the intense disenchantment he experienced during the period 1914-20 that fueled his great poem.

    I think the key to understanding 'The Waste Land' is the underlying theme of earthly dissatisfaction. The earth negativity of earth cannot simply be overcome. It has to be transcended.

    Religious belief - and Christian eschatology - is what 'The Waste Land' champions.

  • IB :

    12 Oct 2011 11:00:14pm

    The last two lines are so true. People turn to faith when the suffering seems unbearable. Happy people have no need for blind faith. They feel empowered to deal with whatever comes their way. Scientific approach to problem solving, being evidence-based, has created a much greater number of genuinely happy people who have abandoned religious dogma.

      • Dingkafat :

        13 Oct 2011 3:03:22pm

        Right. This is why juvenile suicide is at an all-time high... Too many genuinely happy people, indeed...

          • IB :

            17 Oct 2011 10:15:03pm

            I find too many religious people lead a needlessly miserable existence. They go on about how terrible everything is. There is no joy in their lives. They are the living dead. They can't wait to die to go their version of heaven, and yet fear death the most. Young people who feel empowered to tackle their problems head-on are the beneficiaries of their constructive action. Religion disempowers people due to the erroneous notion that there is some cosmic plan or God out there.

              • Peter :

                31 Jan 2013 7:54:04am

                I simply note that your comment, anecdotally referencing some religious people you happen to know and from that deducing that Religion (which?) disempowers them. However, my experience is that many Christian's lives are filled with joy through their lives to the very end. Who is right. It's impossible to say based on the people we happen to know!

              • Chauncey :

                07 Jan 2014 10:05:26pm

                IB, you are on the outside looking in and, therefore, have no real idea what religious people are experiencing. Also, it would appear as though the religious people to whom you are referring are an unrepresentative sample. To leave out an attempt to commune with a higher power as part of your life is to miss out on the ultimate reason for being. Sure, you can be relatively content, but you can never ascend to the uppermost reaches of fulfillment that existence offers. The sad thing is that unless you experience it, yourself, you will forever be looking at it from the outside and, hence, will continue to be as dismissive of it as you currently are. A vicious circle.

                The people to whom you are referring, if you are accurate as to what is really going on within them, are not on the proper spiritual path. And your final sentence shows a close-mindedness that is mildly amusing to me and profoundly sad for you. It is the statement of someone who doesn't know how to explore the mysterious.

          • Jian :

            18 Oct 2011 11:25:08am

            Dingkafat, can you provide step-wise logical deduction that "juvenile suicide is at an all-time high" is the result of "Scientific approach to problem solving". Do you think with your brain or with your heart?

      • Holly (Christ lives within) :

        18 Oct 2011 8:03:12am

        'Genuine people’ of temperance and patience ‘smell the fragrances of the minds of great men and women’ as much can be seen and read from this one persuasive point as it quietens the temperance in the 'thunder of the seas' in an infusion of the eloquence of the past into pointing the way in the fluency and essence of rhetorical debate.

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