Writer · Contemporary
T. S. Eliot
1888–1965 · Anglo-Catholic modernism in poetry; Christian cultural criticism
An Anglo-Catholic who kept daily Mass and confession, honored Our Lady, read Dante, Aquinas and Maritain, and declined to become a Catholic, holding that the Church of England was already catholic.
Born in St. Louis and educated at Harvard, the Sorbonne and Oxford, Eliot settled in London, wrote The Waste Land (1922), and in 1927 was baptized into the Church of England and became a British subject, declaring himself ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion’. Ash-Wednesday (1930), Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and Four Quartets (1943) are the poetry of that faith: penitence, the Incarnation as ‘the point of intersection of the timeless with time’, the dark way of St. John of the Cross, and ‘the fire and the rose’ of Dante's Paradiso. The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948) argued that a culture is the incarnation of a religion and that liberalism, having no positive content, prepares the way for paganism. He edited The Criterion, published Maritain and Dawson, served as churchwarden of St. Stephen's, Gloucester Road, and received the Nobel Prize in 1948.
Why he matters: The greatest Christian poet of the twentieth century in English, he carried Dante, Lancelot Andrewes and St. John of the Cross to a secular readership and gave Maritain, Dawson and the Christian humanists a hearing in The Criterion; Russell Kirk, Dawson and Catholic critics since have treated him as one of their own, and Four Quartets is read in Catholic retreats.
Where to be careful
He stayed outside the communion of Rome and rejected the papal claims (Pastor Aeternus) while sharing nearly all else; his remarks on ‘free-thinking Jews’ in After Strange Gods (1934), which he later suppressed, are the kind of prejudice the Holy Office condemned in 1928. Common ground: the Incarnation and the sacraments, original sin, the contemplative way, and the conviction that no culture lives without its religion.
Reading
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Four QuartetsT. S. Eliot · Burnt Norton to Little Gidding: the Incarnation, purgation and the Cloud of Unknowing in verse.
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The Idea of a Christian SocietyT. S. Eliot · The 1939 lectures on the Christian state, written with Dawson and Maritain in hand.
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Eliot and His AgeRussell Kirk · A Catholic conservative's reading of the whole career (1971).
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.