A Christian country?

Are we a Christian country? Against this is the fact that those who identify as Christian are now a minority. According to the 2021 census 46.2% defined  themselves as Christian and  37.2% said they had no religion. Muslims constituted 6.5 % of the population and Hindus 1.7%. So from the point of view of individual belief we are a pluralistic, multi-faith country. Most of life carries on without any reference to religion. It is assumed that people have different beliefs and this is a private matter.

However in a recent parliamentary speech  Danny Kruger the MP for East Wiltshire argued strongly that we still are a Christian country and called for a return to ‘Christian politics’. He is certainly right in his first assertion. Our whole history has been shaped by the Christian faith, as have our major institutions. Even more fundamental the values which we take for granted, like the equal worth and dignity of each person, are a direct result of the influence of the Christian faith. This has been demonstrated in  books by historians like Tom Holland and Larry Siedentop ( who particularly stressed the role of St Paul).

This Christian faith has taken particular form in the shape of the Church of England and its special role in relation to the monarchy and the state. The Monarch is crowned in  Westminster abbey by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Each day in parliament begins with prayers, in which parliamentarians identify themselves as ‘We thine unworthy servants’. In recent years Church of England bishops and priests have exercised this role in a very inclusive and hospitable manner. Indeed other religions welcome the establishment of the Church of England as an umbrella in which their own place and contribution is recognised.

In his speech Mr Kruger expressed two worries related to moving away from our Christian roots. One was the rise of Islam, whilst noting that on a number of social issues he stood with them. About the other religion, which worried him more, he said  ‘I do not think that “woke” does justice to its seriousness’. Unfortunately his attempt to define what he meant was so vague and general and polemical it is simply not possible to say what he is really getting at. Will someone define  what it is to be ‘woke’ and why I should be worried about it?

Like Mr Kruger I believe that the reality of  God as made known in Christ is the most fundamental fact of all for both the life of a nation and for each individual. It is good that Mr Kruger has reminded us of this. But to trumpet this in our present society would I believe be counter productive. Not only would it fail to resonate with the majority it would be mis-interpreted to imply that Christians were seeking special privilege or that they would like to enact repressive legislation And his call for a ‘Christian politics’ glides over the fact that Christians do in fact disagree on a number of issues. I am strongly opposed to the Assisted Dying bill but there are a few Christians who support it and presumably do so on Christian grounds.

Rather than stressing that we are a Christian society I believe what we should face up to is the decline in Christian influence and as a result the consequent  lack of any underlying and unifying ethical basis for our life together. We need to work together with people of other faiths and no faith to affirm certain fundamentals that are sadly lacking at the moment. These are that we are moral beings, that life is a moral struggle, and that whether or not we think we are ultimately accountable to God we are accountable to one another. On this basis we need to oppose the moral relativism which is so prevalent and debilitating in our society at the moment and to reassert our belief that as human beings we are truth seeking, truth telling beings. This is not the Gospel but it is an essential preparation for the Gospel.

T.S. Eliot got it just right when he argued that a Christian society would be one in which ‘the natural end of man -virtue and well being in community- would be acknowledged for all and the supernatural end- beatitude- for those with eyes to see it.’ The importance of this definition is first of all in its rejection of individualism, for the end is well being in community for everyone. Then what startles the modern mind is the inclusion of the word ‘virtue’- but this is just what our society needs now. Virtue cannot be imposed by the state, which can only make laws. But unless virtue, or what we might call fundamental decency, is a feature of society, the role of the state will be little better than that of a cage to stop us tearing one another apart.

In recent decades our society and its governments have been shaped by a combination of market and social liberalism. In other words, the only value that has been recognised is that of free choice, both in the market to buy what you want in in personal life to do what you want. It is now beginning to be recognised that a much thicker set of values is needed and free choice cannot and should not stand alone. This is one of the reasons why there has been a swing to right wing populism and in some cases a turn to Roman Catholicism. The Christian churches have a crucial role to play in helping people rediscover those fundamental values without which no society can operate. It is not a question of downplaying the essential beliefs of our faith but of what is the appropriate and right action in our society now.

Now is not the time to placard the claim that we are a Christian country. We remain a Christian country in the sense outlined above, but this is a truth about which at the moment it is best to be reticent in the same way Bonhoeffer suggested in his letters. What is needed is the expression of our  Christian faith  in a desire to find common cause with others in championing human beings as above all moral beings, and our life together as based on certain fundamental values.  

Richard Harries is the author of Faith in politics? Rediscovering the Christian roots of our political values.

The World Within: why writers and artists and thinkers retreat

Guy Stagg

Scribner (Simon and Schuster)

978-1-3985-3350-9

Why do people withdraw from life, sometimes for quite long periods? Why do people, including now many secular people, go on retreat? Guy Stagg asks these questions in relation to three of the most arresting people of the 20^th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who shifted our whole understanding of philosophy, David Jones, at once a remarkable poet and painter, and Simone Weil, the French intellectual and mystic.

In this intriguing book Stagg brings out a number of different reasons why these three led such radically different lives from most of us, some more easy to understand than others. One is the reason for solitude in order to concentrate on essential work. So Wittgenstein went to a remote area of Norway in order to write the Tractatus Logico- Positivus  and David Jones spent the last years of his life in a dishevelled hotel bedroom totally given over to his painting and lettering. Then a person might be solitary by nature. All three of those discussed were essentially loners.

More startling are some of the motives that drove this apartness from normal human activity. With Simone Weil it was a desire to fully identify with human suffering. This was what led her first to join the republican cause in Spain, then to work for a year on a conveyer belt in a factory despite being nearly crippled with migraine. When the war came she could have stayed safely in the USA but came back to Europe to support the resistance but refusing to eat more than what she judged the poorest ate, she in effect starved herself to death. With Wittgenstein the reason is more difficult to grasp. During World War I he had deliberately put himself in the position of most danger. He separated himself from the huge wealth of his family to live on his earnings.  Leaving academic life he worked for a period as a gardener in a monastery, then trained as a teacher and taught in remote mountain schools for years. It seems as though he was troubled about his own character and wanted to put himself through the most difficult trials both to test himself and to grow morally as a person.

Where this book comes to its most crucial focus, however, is in the relation between the life style of these three and their understanding of suffering. All three of them suffered terribly. Three of Wittgenstein’s siblings died young probably from suicide  and suicide was never far from his own thoughts. He was homosexual at a time when this was illegal and he deeply grieved the death a friend  in early life whom he deeply loved. Unlike Wittgenstein David Jones did not have a need to suffer. In his long poem In Parenthesis, written from the standpoint of ‘Dai Greatcoat, which Auden called the best book to come out of World War I the tone is almost jaunty. But as a result of writing it Jones clearly suffered what we now know as PTSD and for three years he could do absolutely nothing. Most startling of all is Simone Weil. Her thought is always fresh, confident and arresting-and deeply disturbing- because for her suffering was not just an inevitable part of having a creation, it existed in the very heart of God, and the only true way to this God was to enter fully into the affliction  of  his absence. About the cry of dereliction on the cross she said  it was there that we had true proof Christ was divine.

Stagg writes ‘Misery is no guarantee of genius, and, in the case of these three, their achievements came in spite rather than because of their suffering’ (p.180). The first part of this sentence is clearly true, the second is more open to question. In the case of Wittgenstein and Weil, though not David Jones, the uncompromising nature of their personalities, with which their genius is so integrally linked, made some form of suffering inevitable.   

All three figures were deeply religious, but they understood religion differently. Jones converted to Catholicism as a result of seeing Mass and came to see all life in sacramental terms and his work as sign making. Wittgenstein  was also converted to Catholicism but for him what mattered was the ethical endeavour, the struggle to be a different person, about the rest one had to be silent. Weil had an overpowering religious experience. Reading George Herbert’s poem ‘Love’ she said that Christ took possession of her soul yet she refused to be baptised for fear of cutting herself off from wider humanity with whom she felt in solidarity.

This book is not only about these three figures, it is a very  personal quest of the author himself. In a relaxed and informative way he visits  and takes the reader to all the places and religious houses associated with his three subjects wondering at the back to his mind what there might be in withdrawal and retreat for his own life. But there is a fundamental difficulty here. He visits as a spectator, and as  he is a close, attentive  observer  we get some excellent writing about the places and people, with no false romantism, indeed some quite astringent realism. But this means that as an observer he can never quite fully enter into the experience and is sometimes bored by the place or the religious services. The result however is that he has given us a  readable book in which the biggest questions of human life are wrestled with by three people prepared to put aside the usual compromises to live with total commitment at the extreme edge both of life and their human spirit.

Richard Harries

He is the author of Haunted by Christ: modern writers and the struggle for faith (SPCK)

The qualities needed in the next Archbishop of Canterbury

Being Archbishop of Canterbury is a killing job, and likely to be even more testing this time round. I used to tease Rowan Williams and say ‘God has given you every possible gift under the sun and as your punishment he has made you Archbishop’. That’s how it must feel sometimes. The most difficult pressure comes from the press and anyone of any sensitivity is bound to feel exposed and nervous by the constant questioning, criticism and risk of saying the wrong thing or being misinterpreted. At the 1988 Lambeth Conference the American bishops were amazed at the constant press attacks on Robert Runcie, and I had to say to them ‘It’s a rough, tough  world over here’. The new archbishop is likely to be particularly vulnerable because of the church’s recent safeguarding failures and because of the general lowering of the status of the Church of England over recent decades. The church is an easy target and the new archbishop will be the person at whom the arrows are shot.

So how can anyone cope with this pressure? Only by the depth of their own Christian faith and the strength of their spiritual life. It does not matter whether they come from a Catholic or Evangelical background because by the time a person has reached the position of being considered they will almost certainly have gained wisdom from outside their own tradition. Both George Carey and Jusin Welby, from evangelical and charismatic backgrounds, drew on the disciplines of Catholic practise and discipline. In any case it is only by being daily and deeply rooted in Christ will anybody survive not just the exposure to the press but the relentless demands on their time and energies. And that points to the second quality which will be required: a capacity to prioritise the work.

The Arcbishop is not just the Chair of the House of Bishops responsible for running the Church of England, he is head of a national church with the expectation he will be able to say something meaningful  to the country as a whole. He is also one of the ‘instruments of communion’ of the Anglican church worldwide and  a focus of its unity. These different roles pull in different directions. Each one is a full time job. So the new archbishop will need to prioritise and as letters flood in every day asking him or her to do this or that they will have to  decide what should  be accepted and what denied. In particular it will mean distinguishing the important from what claims to be urgent and focussing on the former. This will mean asking time and again, what is it that I as Archbishop, and only I, can and ought to do.

It is not necessary to be an able administrator like Geoffrey Fisher. A good chief of staff at Lambeth and their team there should be able to deal with all that adequately. Nor can we necessarily expect the new archbishop to be an outstanding theologian like Michael Ramsey or a public intellectual like Rowan Williams. But they must be able to communicate intelligently and clearly to both the church and the country.  Recent Archbishops have been good communicators to certain kinds of audience such as conferences and church gatherings. But what is required in our age is the ability to communicate  in a society where Christianity has become a foreign language and what goes on in church strange if not alien. The present Archbishop of York has something of this gift -the new Archbishop will need it.

As we all  know the unity of the Church of England and the Anglican Communion have been severely strained in recent decades over same sex relationships. So the new Archbishop will have the unenviable task of somehow holding both the Church of England and the Anglican Communion together. This requires a particular kind of gift, combining  spirituality and wisdom in a way which evokes trust.

All the seven Archbishops of Canterbury  I have known have brought some particular  gifts to the role and I am sure the next one will have their own unique contribution to make. Although, as I have stressed, it is a killing role at a difficult time for the church there are also some tiny signs that the climate might be more receptive to what the Christian faith has to offer. The dogmatic atheism of Richard Dawkins and his ilk has long been discredited and is now very passé. And there are a few more voices in the public sphere  willing to confess the faith.

So the new Archbishop of Canterbury will need to have a deeply rooted faith and a strong spiritual life to enable them to manage the daily strain of the press and the relentless pressure of work. They will need to prioritise that work and constantly ask what is the particular contribution they can make in their role. This will mean being firm in refusing a good number of very worthwhile engagements. They will need both the personal qualities and skill to hold together an organisation that is in danger of fragmenting. And they will need to be able to speak in a language that is intelligent, clear and understandable to a sceptical nation. It is not impossible. In all the hyped up nonsense on television someone like Monty Don comes across as the real thing, able to talk about gardening in a way which is authoritative, natural and authentic. He is a good role model for a new archbishop  talking about the faith.

So how can the new archbishop cope? Like St Paul she or he will be  all too aware of their  weakness and ready to hear the words  “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”  (2 Corinthians 12.9) Perhaps they could also take some advice from George Carey and his wife Eileen who decided that whatever the strains of the job they would still try to enjoy it.

Richard Harries. In his autobiography The Shaping of a Soul: a life taken by surprise, he has a chapter on the seven Archbishops of Canterbury he has known.  

Right and wrong

Recently in the House of Lords there was a question about the rise in the number old age pensioners shoplifting. The Peer who asked it was clearly trying to draw attention to the extent of poverty amongst old people. The Minister, Lord Hanson of Flint, in his answer said that shoplifting by anyone, whether they were a pensioner or not, was ‘unacceptable’ and should not be ‘tolerated’. Why those words? Why not just say that it was wrong? For some time now we have been frightened of using the word. We even talk about shoplifting rather than stealing. Those who use social media can be very judgemental, but even there words like right and wrong do not come naturally.

For centuries all children were taught the ten commandments. In many churches they were written on either side of the altar. They grew up believing we lived in a universe in which moral choices had to be made. It was not just a matter of what was legal or expedient but what was right. This certainly prevailed until the end of the 1950’s. Children would still then be taught a famous story about George Washington, how when he was six he was given an axe which he used to  cut down his father’s cherry tree. When his father was angry George Washington owned up to it, not being able to tell a lie, and his father’s anger dissipated. I suspect that all this teaching about right and wrong  began to fade in the 1960’s and certainly by the 1980’s we had come to the position where people could say ‘greed is good’  and where what was legal rather than what was honest became the prevailing mood.

There are three understandable reasons why we shy away from the language of right and wrong. First of all we have grown in our understanding of how people might be drawn into crime by social deprivation, dysfunctional upbringing, psychological factors or often a combination of all of them. It is of course good that we should trying to understand those forces but this should not undermine a basic belief that people are responsible for their actions. When Dostoevsky was in prison he had to live with some of the most hardened  criminals  on earth. Although felt a deep sense of pity for them he still asserted they must take hold of their own lives.

Secondly we hesitate to use  the language of morality for fear of sounding  self-righteous. If you say someone is wrong they might feel that you are claiming a moral superiority. Christians in particular ought to be able to address this one, because we know we are not morally superior to others. We are all mired in the solidarity of sin. Somehow we have to learn to use the language of right and wrong without implying any kind of self  righteousness.  Reinhold Niebuhr was exemplary in this regard. For example, he never doubted that we should fight the evil of the Nazis but was always aware that the seeds of that evil were in ourselves. As a line from one of his prayers runs ‘We pray for wicked and cruel men, whose arrogance reveals to us what the sin of our own hearts is like when it has conceived and brought forth its final fruit’. Or again, ‘We pray for ourselves who live in peace and quietness, that we may not regard our good fortune as proof of our virtue.’

Third, there is the widespread moral relativism of our times, the belief that moral judgements simply reflect the outlooks of different people and  cultures and there is nothing objective about them. In fact although there is indeed some variety  it is not possible to find a society in which stealing and murder for example, are not condemned. There are some acts, such as torturing babies, which revolt any sane person. We live in a world where judgments have to be made, even though there may be fault on both sides. The Nato countries are partly to blame for the fact that we have the war in Ukraine, for steps could have been taken at the end of the Cold War to make Russia feel less paranoid about its policies. But there is no moral equivalence between Ukraine and Russia. Putin deliberately invaded a friendly neighbour and is causing the death of thousands of his own countrymen apart from the many Ukrainians. It was an evil act.

In fact there are rare occasions when we are aware of a moral dimension to life- when there is a national scandal. The then Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak said  to the House of Commons on the blood infection scandal:

 This is a day of shame for the British state. Today’s report shows a decades-long moral failure at the heart of our national life-from the National Health Service to the civil service to ministers in successive governments at every level.

He talked about a ‘moral failure at the heart of our national life’. The problem is that, as has been shown in relation not only to the blood infection disaster  but the Post Office scandal and the Grenfell Tower fire, we do not seem able to hold individuals or institutions properly to account. We hold up our hand in horror but no one is held responsible. Andrew Marr has written: ‘It’s time to acknowledge the obvious: we have a moral and intellectual hole sitting in the middle of our democracy’. Until we can hold particular individuals and institutions to account there will continue to be this hole.

We do not want a return to the alleged moralism of the Victorians and any kind of self-righteousness needs to be guarded against. We are after all welcomed by Christ through sheer graciousness not by any moral achievement.  But as human beings we are moral beings and life is a moral struggle. The Philosopher Wittgenstein  wrote that his life was in the world and:

That my will penetrates the world.

That my will is good or evil.

Therefore that good and evil are somehow

Connected with the meaning of the world.

It is a message our present generation badly needs to hear again in relation to all aspects of life, personal and political, individual and institutional.

Richard Harries. He is the author of The Re-enchantment of morality (SPCK) which was short listed for the Michael Ramsy Prize.

Alexei Navalny Patriot

As the world outside Russia continues to be shocked  by the unswerving support given by Patriarch Kiril to President  Putin, it is encouraging  to know that Putin’s main opponent,  the courageous Alexei Navalny, was strengthened  by his membership of the Orthodox Church which he entered as an adult having previously been an atheist.

Navalny grew up under communism in an army family and was appalled by the lies and more lies under which the country had to live. When Putin came to power it was not just the lies that enraged him but the massive corruption of both Putin himself and his cronies. After training as a lawyer he founded an anti-corruption organisation which exposed their vast wealth and also stood for election as Mayor of Moscow.  Despite everything the regime did to hinder him he managed 22.7% of the vote. He was however barred from standing in the 2018 Presidential election.

Navalny really hit the world headlines however when he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in August 2020. Flown to Germany for treatment he miraculously emerged from a long coma and resumed his activities. He returned to Russia knowing it would mean endless arrests, imprisonments and his likely death, which turned out to be the case. He was sent to ever harsher prisons and finally to one in the artic circle where he died.  Angela Merkel had visited Navalny when he received treatment in Germany. She wrote ‘Navalny returned to Russia, only to be arrested at the airport. What followed was a three year martyrdom. On Feb16 , 2024 Alexei Navalny died  in a Russian prison camp, a victim of  the repressive  state power of his home country.’[1]

Navalny kept a prison dairy for these last years and they reveal  the portrait  of an extraordinary spirit.[2] He refused to be broken by the system, and continually argued back to his guards, but all the time with an amazing sense of humour and confidence. Despite all the attempts to isolate and humiliate him he retained a sense of elan, confident that the truth would eventually win through.

There are many nice touches of humour, as for example when he echoes Kant in saying there are two things in life that matter, the starry skies above and  the moral imperative withing  but  then adds a third,  passing his hand over his bald head.

What was the secret of this spirit? Clearly he was born with a sense of chuzpah, for even at school he was the pupil who cheekily answered back. He was also wonderfully supported by his lovely wife Yulia, who shared his ideas and was willing to suffer with and as a result of his activities. He also found meditation a great help in calming his impulsive temper. But what emerges from the diary is how much his discovery of the Christian faith sustained him through his ordeals. This began with the birth of the couple’s first  child Dasha in 2001.As he wrote:

Having a child changed my life in an unexpected way…Like anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union, I had never believed in God, but looking now at Dasha and how she was developing, I could not reconcile myself to the thought that this was only a matter of biology….From a dyed-in-the-wool atheist , I gradually became a religious person. (p.181)

Even during his time in prison Navalny fasted in Lent and had to face the absurdity that the bread he himself was not eating could not be given to another prisoner and had to be thrown away. During this time he learn the beatitudes by heart not only in Russian but in English French and Latin as well. One of the beatitudes in particular was crucially important to him, ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be fulfilled’. In his final appeal to the judge in one case he makes this central. Despite his position as a prisoner he tells the judge that  he finds some satisfaction and fulfilment in trying to make that beatitude his own, and he argues that  deep down this is what the Russian people want. In the end righteousness will prevail over the deeply unrighteous Russian state. Truth will out and will win through. This faith undergirded his natural courage and gave him the nice mixture of self depreciation and irony that is so characteristic of his personality. The beatitude was  true because he did indeed find himself genuinely fulfilled in what he was doing .(p326-8) In an entry for  March 22^nd 2022, but which forms an epilogue to the diary,  he says he lies on his bunk looking up and asking himself if he is a Chrisian in his heart of hearts. He suggests with some ambiguity that some of what passes for religion may not be necessary  but then adds:

My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and leave it to Jesus and the rest of his family  to deal with everything else…..As they say in prison here: they will take my punches for me. (p.479)

[1] Angela Merkel, Freedom, Macmillan, 2024, p.675

[2] Alexei Navalny Patriot, The Bodley Head, 2024

A book, a letter and a photo

In early 1958 I was serving as a soldier in Germany and thinking hard about the Christian faith. One of the books I read was Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy. This suggested that the great faiths had in common the idea of losing yourself to find yourself, of giving yourself away. And it struck me that if this is at the heart of reality what could be a more sublime example than the incarnation, when God gives himself to humanity. So it was that through a non-Christian book the central claim of Christianity was reinforced for me.

Also in the regiment was Lance Corporal John Haliburton with his baggy battle dress and waddle walk. But there was little in the regiment than went on without him. He ran the orderly room and being fluent in German was the regimental interpreter.  He organised the chapel, the jazz band, played the organ and ran a bible study group. In between he sneaked into the officer’s mess and in response to my sherry talked theology to me. God rest him. Many books have influenced me, but The Perennial Philosophy affected me in a surprising, unpredictable way and made me see that the incarnation is congruous with our deepest spiritual insights.

In 1972 I was the first and last Warden of Wells in the newly merged Salisbury and Wells Theological College. One day a letter arrived from Robert Stopford, the Bishop of London, asking me if I would be interested in being Vicar of All Saints, the old parish church of Fulham. Three years earlier I had been looking for, and the Bishop had remembered, that this was the kind of parish in which  I wanted to serve.  It was  the only time in my life when  I knew just  what I wanted. I did not want to worship what E. M. Forster termed the great suburban Jehovah and I did not want an eclectic inner city congregation. I wanted a socially mixed congregation in London but not too far out. Nothing was available. Several unsuitable jobs failed to materialise, and then I saw the Wells job advertised and although I had not originally thought I wanted to be on the staff of a theological college, it has turned out to be hugely important to me. The discipline of lecturing on doctrine and ethics laid a foundation for much of what I have done. Not finding what I wanted earlier, and as a result doing something which later  turned out to be so fundamental for my ministry, seems to me now a providential ordering.

When I retired as Bishop of Oxford in 2006 people often used to say to me ‘Do you miss Oxford?’ but I could not think of anything I missed. I began to wonder if I was normal not missing anything. Then some years later I realise I did indeed miss something-being part of the senior staff team with its shared sense of purpose and much humour. We  met every month but once a year we went away for a weekend together at a retreat house where we would worship, plan strategically and share convivial meals. On the Saturday afternoon we went for a long walk in the beautiful Oxfordshire countryside. What I came to miss was never again being part of a small team which combined seriousness and laughter, mutual support and respect for difference. I think for many people it is in a small group that they first discover the reality of Christian community.  I discovered this at Wells Theological College, where we all had to be part of a house group. In Fulham, I encouraged the development of house groups and where once a year we took 30 or so people away for a weekend together. That weekend did more for church life that a whole year of church going. Another important group for me was my episcopal cell which met residentially twice a year. It is through such opportunities for sharing at some depth that we discover what it is to be the church, part of mystical body of all Christ’s faithful people. This photo of our senior staff team on one of our walks is a reminder and symbol of this.  

Richard Harries. His autobiography is The Shaping of a Soul: a life taken by surprise, Christian Alternative Books

Why democracy matters

A recent poll in the UK revealed that 1 in 5  people in the age group 18-45 would prefer a strong unelected leader to democracy. This is worrying and shows up a serious failure in our education system. It also seems to be part of a world wide move away from democracy to dictatorship, autocracy and various forms of managed democracy. Even a country like India, once a byword for democracy, now has serious flaws in the way minorities find it hard to obtain justice and academics are put under pressure not to criticise Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.

Goodness knows, democracy has its flaws and there is a temptation to think that a strong leader would make things work better; ‘make the trains run on time’ in the notorious phrase applied to Mussolini. Then there is always pressure on democracy from powerful economic forces.  Marx said that democracy meant no more than ‘the opportunity of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people’. Today we might want to qualify this and talk not about a ruling class but a global economic elite who are able to pressurise governments.

In the course of history the Christian church has justified almost every form of government from the divine right of kings to the latest  military junta, so it is proper to be sceptical and ask why democracy has any special claim on the Christian conscience. After all it was not until Pope Leo XIII in the late 19^th century that the Papacy accepted that democracy might align itself with Christian values.

It was Reinhold Niebuhr in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness who gave the classic Christian defence of democracy. There he wrote ‘Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary’.  Our capacity for justice enables us at least some of the time to think of the common good not just our own interests and to work for the good of all not just for ourselves. But as Niebuhr said our inclination to injustice should make us suspicious of all centres of power and keep us vigilant that they do not become tyrannies. Luther knew well that we have this inclination to injustice, indeed he thought of human beings as like wild animals who needed the strong cage of the state to stop us tearing one another in pieces. What he ignored was the fact that the state itself is the biggest beast of all and needs its own strong cage. It is from this inclination to injustice that there arises the classic separation of powers in democracy: the judiciary, the executive and the legislature. The executive, that is, the government of the day, is held in check by an independent judiciary and an elected assembly.

Until recently in this country we failed the test of a separation  of powers because the Law Lords sat in the House of Lords and the Lord Chancellor was not only head of the judiciary responsible for appointing judges, but a member of both the legislature and the cabinet. That all changed in 2005 with the Constitution Reform Act and in  2009 when the Supreme Court came into existence. The key point is the real independence of the judiciary. In Russia, as was seen in the case of Alexi Navalny and countless others, the judicial system operates according to what Putin wants, in Navalny’s case his imprisonment and death. This means that any attack on the Judiciary such as the Mail headline ‘Enemies of the people’ in 2016  undermines a fundamental pillar of democracy.

No less important is freedom of the media. Sadly what we see in so many countries is the media being controlled either directly or though allies by the government. Social media has made a big difference in keeping the possibility of truth alive but here again it can be controlled or subject to vast attempts at misinformation.

No doubt many of  those 1 in 5 who would rather have a strong unelected leader take that view because they have not actually lived under a repressive regime. But more crucially they have not had the requisite teaching at school. Schools are meant to teach citizenship education but a House of Lords Committee found that whilst a few schools do this well most were failing badly. They either subsumed it under Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural values or did not teach it at all. This is not good enough. Our society is founded upon certain fundamental political values and pupils should know what they are and why they matter so much. This is closely linked to the whole question of Fundamental British Values. A flawed version of these were brought in as a response to terror threats and it is mandatory for schools to teach them. My private members bill, which was passed in the Lords but still has to be taken up in the Commons, has a much more balanced and holistic view. This states that our values are democracy, the rule of law, freedom, individual worth, and respect for the environment. “Freedom” includes freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly and association.  “Individual worth” means respect for the equal worth and dignity of every person. “Respect for the environment” is defined as taking into account the systemic effect of human actions on the health and sustainability of the environment both within the United Kingdom and the planet as a whole, for present and future generations.

Democracy round the world is under threat. It matters desperately that citizens of our country understand the fundamental political values on which our society is based and why they are so crucial. Democracy is a fragile achievement, the result of centuries  of struggle and conflict. It is far from perfect and our present form of democracy is  not the last word on the subject. As has been well said, it is the worst system in the world except for all the others. But flawed as it is, we need to guard and protect it. It needs to be taught in our schools.

Richard Harries is the author of Faith in Politics? Rediscovering the roots of our political values, DLT

There is a play in which an elderly man and his son are facing up to a visit to their local clinic. It is set about 30 years in the future when medicine has advanced to the point where the doctor can tell him not only that he has an incurable condition but that he has exactly  3 years  3 months and 3 days  to live. After seeing the doctor the man goes to see a counsellor who discusses with him at what point he will take the pill which will kill him. She stresses it is very much his decision but the unstated assumption is that at some point he will ask for this. However, the man and his son decide to buck the system. A few years before this the man’s wife had asked for a  lethal dose which had shortened her life, a decision  they had regretted  ever since. So they decide to see out the illness to the end, not hasten the death. [1]

Proponents of assisted dying will complain that this is too far fetched, and that we would never change into a society in which assisted dying became the default position. But they are wrong for the very   reason that drives them to support the present bill: compassion. It is compassion which quite rightly wants to stop the suffering of those for whom it has become unbearable. But why should it be limited to those with just a few months to live? A man with Parkinson’s has already complained that the proposed bill does not go far enough for him. A few years ago a young man  paralysed from the waist down as a result of a rugby accident went to Switzerland with Dignitas to end his life. Who could not feel for him? Rugby had been his passion. What now had he to live for? His prospect, of a lifetime in that condition, would seem to be even more appalling than someone with having to live with cancer for six months. If the present bill was passed there would immediately be pressure to expand it in the direction of the laws in Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands. As Hannah Barnes pointed out recently, in the Netherlands there were 138 assisted deaths last year of people with a mental illness, the majority of them single women under 60 suffering from depression and one was under 20.

Supporters of the present bill focus on a number of genuinely hard cases, urging compassion for those dying of unbearable suffering. But the issue is not just about individual cases. If I was in a jungle and my companion was dying in agony with no means of alleviating their pain and he begged me to shoot him it might indeed be the right thing to do. But we are not dealing with an isolated incident with no repercussions for society as a whole. We are concerned with a change in the law and its effect on society as a whole not just in the immediate future but in the longer term.

It is predicted that there will be 1.4 million people living with dementia in 2040, at a cost of £90 billion. With the fall in the birthrate the cost of this and the care involved on a smaller working population will be huge. There could be great pressures for this burden to be eased by letting people faced with dementia opt for assisted dying. And if our only value is personal autonomy, why not? A distinguished academic for whom the life of the mind has been his raison d’être is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. For him this is worse than death. He asks for assistance in dying. Compassion and a stress on personal autonomy could combine to accede to his request.

So the question is whether we want to go down that road? Some will say they do, and will press for similar legislation to that in Canada and the Netherlands. Others, like myself, will say no. We do not want a society like that with the real possibility of a  fundamental shift in its attitude to the sick and suffering. What we must  not do is delude ourselves into thinking that the present bill, if passed, will be the end of it. It will inevitably lead on to a campaign to widen it out, and the same compassion which drives the present bill will drive a new one into existence. Compassion is an emotion. It leads one to feel with the other person. But that does not tell us what is right. As a rational ethical principle compassion  simply places ‘the good’ in the front of the mind, the good of the person suffering. But it does not answer that question and it does not answer the question of how one might weigh up the good of one individual, in terms of shortening their suffering, with the loss of a major good for society as whole, by undermining a sense of  the essential worth and dignity of every human being whatever state they are in.

Proponents of assisted dying tend to regard it as just one more step in the great progressive march. But they are simplistic in their relentless focus on the suffering of a few high profile cases without facing the real issue which is about changing the law in a world where an originally tight law could move rapidly to one with a much wider remit. And they are philosophically naïve in refusing to see that a stress on compassion itself does not give the answer, but only opens up the question to a serious weighing of goods and ills.

[1] Declaration of interest: I recently wrote the play, which is called ‘The Clinic’

Eliot, Auden and the Enjoyment of Life

The 2024 T. S. Eliot Lecture

Thursday October 24^th, Newnham College, Cambridge

In our own rather thin secular age it is interesting to reflect that 70 years or so ago the two most distinguished poets of the time were Christian believers. What is also interesting to note is that in at least one important respect their approach to the faith, at least as expressed in their poetry, was somewhat different. One of the purposes of this lecture is to explore that difference. To put it in technical terms, Eliot’s approach was that of the Via negative and Auden’s the Via positive, though I am interpreting those terms fairly widely. The  negative way suggests that we can only know God through the way of denial, through letting go of the things of the world, and in the end even letting go of the images we use about God. Eliot’s classic expression of this, quoting St John of the Cross, is in section III of East Coker. The positive way, on the other hand, suggests that we can know God in and through the things of the world and our language about God, however limited, can say something that is true.

I want to begin by looking at the early period of the renewed  relationship of Eliot with Emily Hale, to see what their correspondence reveals about him and his understanding of life.[1]

In their relationship a number of misunderstandings and difficulties arose. The major one was to do with Eliot’s refusal to consider a divorce from Vivienne. Another was the way Emily, though an unbaptised Unitarian decided to receive Communion in an Anglican church without first asking permission of the parish priest; and this, Eliot felt, was a sign  her failure to understand the seriousness of his religious beliefs, not least when it precluded divorce. But underlying these differences was a fundamental difference of temperament leading to a different  understanding of Christianity and what it entailed.

Every person is a mystery. But Eliot in particular does not fit into normal categories and is likely to elude us. Emily Hale recognised this from an early stage in their epistolary relationship, and told him, that there was something very unusual, out of the ordinary, about his personality. This is revealed I think first of all in his understanding of ordinary virtues.

 For most of us virtues like kindness or generosity would be on a spectrum and being a Christian would involve trying to  be kinder or more generous. Of course Eliot hoped that would be the case with him  but he believed there was a fundamental divide between all such virtues and a higher standard to which he felt accountable. This is shown both in his attitude to his parents and to his chairman and close friend Geoffrey Faber. Eliot’s parents loved him, indeed indulged him, but he believed they simply lived out the values of their class and background, together with an inherited sense of Eliot superiority, without any sense that there was an ultimate standard before which they fell short. Similarly with Geoffrey Faber and his family. He knew them well, liked them very much and indeed spent his summer holidays with them in the 1930’s their country house Ty Glyn Aeron, in West Wales. He thought them gentle and good and the very backbone of England. But they had no religious strivings. He wished they could have more passion and as he put it, that would run down the street amok with eyes blazing. [2] He thought their virtues were mainly a result of their upbringing and a comfortable position in life. As he wrote:

People who remain through life ‘naturally’ good are merely people well brought up in good habits and conventions, whose lives have been so happily conducted that they have never experienced temptation-that is to say most of my relatives. I prefer a person who has committed almost any sin and had to gain virtue by suffering; and I think the Gospels confirm this.’[3]  

 He thought Unitarianism was for sheltered lives, but Catholicism gave more and asked more and had sustained him when he felt isolated in the midst of pagans. As he put it: ‘The people who mean most to be are not those who are naturally good but those who strive towards the good.’.[4]

The basis of this is outlined in an address he gave on the Sermon on the Mount, called the two masters. Eliot argued that it is essential for us to have an ideal. If we trim this down to fit the nicest people then we fall into complacency and self-conceit. We must have an ideal measured by saintliness before which we can only feel a sinner and be humble. ‘We must have an ideal so high that measured by it the purest and most devout feels that he is indistinguishable from the greatest sinner. Humility is the greatest virtue, humility, purity, charity.[5]

Eliot was acutely self-aware and this was accentuated by the high sense of duty instilled in him by his New England family. It meant that part of him was Calvinist or Puritan in outlook, or to put it in Catholic terms, Jansenist, which gave him a highly sensitive conscience.  In theory he knew that  Puritanism should have no place in his faith and he described it as  a ‘negative and unsanctified thing to be rid of’[6]. But he recognised that it was part of him. As he wrote ‘I have also the NE conscience and I have been as much operated upon by the sense of guilt as anybody. From the day I married until certainly after my mother’s death nothing held me but the sense of guilt.’[7]

Behind the immaculate façade and the studied politeness, the courtesy and kindness, he knew there was a lot to feel bad about.  He knew he could be bad tempered and difficult, moody and selfish. Few people saw this side of him-though later in life Mary Trevelyan certainly did.[8]  Eliot was not exaggerating when he told Emily that this was indeed a side of him. As he put it: ‘I know I am a very twisted creature…you mustn’t expect me ever to be quite like other people.’[9] In short, behind the impersonal façade was what he called a raging beast.

There is a character in one of Conrad’s novels who always gives a cynical laugh when other people are mentioned. When asked about this he replied that he did not see why he should think more highly of other people than he was able to think of himself. This is a pointer to Eliot’s attitude to humanity. He knew that he himself was deeply flawed and this made him naturally cynical about other people. It was only the love of God, he said, that prevented him lapsing into total cynicism. As he wrote,

the love of God takes the place of the cynicism which otherwise is inevitable to every rational person; for one’s relations to one’s friends and lovers, apart from the love of God, always, in my experience, turn out a delusion and a cheat. Either they let you down, or you let them down, or both but no human relation is in itself,  satisfactory’[10]

Eliot had a sense of   horror about human life and called it a madness. It was only the Christian faith, he thought, that prevented him sinking into that view all the time. For him life was ‘horror, boredom, glory.’

In the light of this it is not surprising that Eliot was not a happy man. Indeed for much of his life, as a result of his first marriage, he was a deeply unhappy one.[11] He endured but did not enjoy life. But with his conversion to the Christian faith he found, he said, something higher than happiness. It was this which made him see life in a totally different light. As he wrote to his friend Paul Elmer More,

To me, religion has brought at least the perception of something above morals, and therefore extremely terrifying; it has brought me not happiness, but the sense of something above happiness and therefore more terrifying that ordinary pain and misery; the very dark night and the desert.’[12]

“I know just enough-and no more-of ‘the peace of God’ to know that it is an extraordinarily painful blessing.” Again “faith is not a substitute for anything: it does not give the things life has refused, but something else; and in the ordinary sense it does not make one happier.”

Eliot’s renewed love for Emily, expressed mainly in their correspondence and their very few meetings brought a kind of extasy into his life. But because it was a relationship that could not find a normal fulfilment it was also intensely frustrating. It too demanded a kind of resignation. As he wrote to her: ‘I think I can face resignation fairly; for after all, I had for many years been resigned to having nothing; but of course the new life demands a new resignation.’

 He went on to say that this did not mean deadening their emotions but feeling acutely all that they were missing and then dwelling on what they now had, seeing it as an opportunity for them to grow closer to one another.[13] It was not just a stoical bearing, a giving without thought of return. They would we be given, even if it was only in the grace to give more.[14]

Eliot is very wise and helpful I think when faced with this kind of situation and the difference a religious faith might make. He strongly rejects the idea that religion  makes up for a lack of human fulfilment. As he wrote more than once. ‘For nothing is a substitute for anything else, that must be faced.’  Again, ‘Suffering does not automatically do people good.’ The majority of people are better off without the deeper forms of suffering. But one has to deal with it by becoming more conscious, trying to understand it ‘and see ones own pain in relation to the pain of the world as a whole and the mystery of pain; and one can make oneself a better person, more of a person, more of oneself, through whatever comes.’[15]

He told Emily they would have to face the pain, not pretend it was not there. The difference made by religious faith was the belief that some further or higher good could come out of this. It was not a substitute for human fulfilment but something of a different order. Most of the time he wrote to Emily, prayer and worship is just a boring habit but there came be moments of illumination-when you then live on two planes, and this makes you more compassionate ‘It is not until you see and feel and touch that something else is more real, that the other fades. This comes to me very rarely. Most of the time I am a beast raging in the jungle’ [16]

Emily Hale was we might say a more rounded normal person than Eliot, with an ordinary human desire for marriage and happiness. But he felt she was not always able to grasp the seriousness with which he took his religion or the nature of their relationship. We see this in their attitude to Burnt Norton. Emily wanted Eliot to write her a love poem. Eliot replied that he already  had and in their correspondence he refers to Burnt Norton as ‘our poem’.[17] It was their poem, in that it arose out of their visit to the house of that name and reflected a mystical, magical moment they had there. That moment is not just one of human love but a fusion of divine and human love. It was a double surrender. ‘It is always to you and yet at the same time it is to something bigger than ‘me’ or ‘you’-to something that only you and I together can look at.[18] ‘Happiness in the ordinary sense is something I know nothing about’ he wrote and the mystical moment with her was   ‘a very queer thing’. It was painful, involving awareness of all the  negatives, of what was not possible but at the same time exalted.

What this part of the correspondence reveals then is that the simple enjoyment of life, to use the words of my title, was not remotely part of Eliot’s agenda. He was caught in the struggle between the ideal of sainthood and the reality of feeling  a raging beast. At the same time he recognised that it was in and through the loss of the ordinary good things in life, like marriage and family life, that he had been touched by a higher power which had transformed his understanding of life. His was the way of dispossession.

Yet this was not of course the whole Eliot. To the outside world he presented his carved face. But behind the façade were a number of different Eliots and to carefully selected people those other Eliots were disclosed. Behind his desk at Faber he was the super conscientious publisher, reading Mss, encouraging young authors, corresponding with writers on the continent. And what comes across in his letters is indeed the care that he took, the meticulous professionalism. With his literary peers he could be the literary man and whilst a million miles away from most of them in terms of belief that did not prevent close supportive friendships, notably with the Woolfs. When Virginia committed suicide he said it was like the loss of one of his family. With his crippled flat mate John Hayward he could reveal devoted care. During the war Hayward was exiled to Cambridge, so Eliot wrote him clever gossipy letters of the kind he knew he would enjoy to keep up his spirits. Then there was his relationship with that excellent woman, to echo Barbara Pym, the formidable Mary Trevelyan with whom he spent evenings listening to music and drinking gin and who proposed to him three times. Then, especially there was the boyish, playful side which came out so strongly in his letters to his godchildren, his cat poems, his love of practical jokes, and his ironic humour which we see for example in:

Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!

With his features of clerical cut,

And his brow so grim

And his mouth so prim

And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely

And If and Perhaps and But.

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!

With a bobtail cur

And a porpentine cat

And a wopsical hat
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!

(Whether his mouth is open or shut).

There were others too who noted that when treated right he could  respond with an ‘equally easy gaity’.[19] And he told Emily he  could be more gay and frivolous with her than anyone else, because she was the one with whom he could be most serious.[20]

Not least it is important not to overlook Eliot’s genuine interest in the world and the enjoyment of some of its pleasures, not just music and literature but detective stories and jazz. He was once shown a dart board and he spent nearly  a whole day practising how to throw a dart accurately. Especially he loved good food. He said he could name at least 50 cheeses, and he typed  three pages, some 1000 words on how to make a simple  lettuce salad. Restaurants where he dined would remember exactly how he liked his meat cut and  he could remember in detail a number of good meals he had eaten  many years before This does not quite add up to the enjoyment of life, but he was able to savour its sensory pleasures. I will return again to this theme and ask how far it was integrated into the serious, puritanical side of his nature but now I want to turn to Auden

Auden’s religious trajectory was very different from that of Eliot. So far as we can know he did not go through a great crisis of belief. Brought up in a devout Anglo-Catholic family at the age of 15, like many teenagers, he turned away from the faith, as he put it ‘to enjoy the pleasures of the world and the flesh’. He returned to the faith in 1940 when he was in America for a number of reasons, one of which was a powerful religious experience in which he realised the people he was with were of ‘infinite value’ simply as themselves.

Wordsworth once wrote to a friend to say  ‘the religion of gratitude cannot mislead us’. This was the strong current in which Auden’s religion flowed. What gives it a particular interest is Auden’s own personality with his great zest for life and interest in everything that is going on. Auden was the most prodigiously talented of all 20^th century poets, possessing a technical virtuosity bordering on wizadry. This was combined with an amazingly wide, often esoteric culture.

 Auden’s father was a doctor who became Professor of Public Health in Birmingham and who was also a keen amateur archaeologist. Auden’s great love as a child were the rocks and landscapes of Yorkshire, with its disused lead mines. One of his brothers became a professional geologist. He himself  originally went up to Oxford to read science with a view to becoming a mining engineer and only there switched to English. There was almost nothing that did not genuinely arouse his curiosity and interest. So as he wrote . “Let us hymn the small but journal wonders/ Of Nature and of households.[21]

One of his best known and loved poems is called “In praise of limestone” which does just that, relating the landscape with its different features to the human condition, and ending up

                When I try to imagine a faultless love

Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur

Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.[22]

This desire to praise the most familiar things found fine expression in his poem Thanksgiving for a habitat, which consists of 12 substantial poems each  about a different  room in the house including the cellar and the lavatory. There is very little in life Auden feels unable to praise, and he even  has a nice paragraph on the spiritual importance of gossip.

This willingness to praise did not come through avoiding the hard, painful facts of life. It was neither evasion nor sentimentality. For Auden too knew pain. He loved Chester Kallman and for much of the time they shared a life together, but Kallman was promiscuous. At a time of great personal pain Auden wrote

O look, look in the mirror, 

  O look in your distress;

Life remains a blessing

  Although you cannot bless.

O stand, stand at the window

  As the tears scald and start;

You must love your crooked neighbour

  With your crooked heart.[23]

Then, in a poem called “Precious five”, celebrating the five senses he wrote

I could (which you cannot)

Find reasons fast enough

To face the sky and roar

In anger and despair

At what is going on,

Demanding that it name

Whoever is to blame:

The sky would only wait

Till all my breath was gone

And then reiterate

As if I wasn’t there

That singular command

I do not understand,

Bless what there is for being,

Which has to be obeyed, for

What else am I made for,

Agreeing or disagreeing?[24]

Then, in ‘A Lullaby; he wrote ‘Let your last thinks all be thanks’

For Auden then, faith took the form of a sensitive alertness to the world about him, in all its aspects, a deep appreciation of it expressed in gratitude and praise. Despite his suffering he wanted to bless what there is for being. As he put it in an early poem after his return to faith

‘O wear your tribulation like a rose.’

On the fundamentals of Christian faith and in what true happiness consists   Eliot and Auden would not have disagreed. As Auden put it:

Happiness consists in a loving and trusting relationship to God; accordingly we are to take one thing and one thing only seriously, our eternal duty to be happy, and to that all considerations of pleasure and pain are subordinate. Thou shalt love God and thy neighbour and Thou shall be happy mean the same thing.[25]

The difference between Eliot and Auden in their approach to the enjoyment of life is a subtle one. Both were Anglo-Catholics, and therefore both had a sacramental view of life, that is, one in which the material world can make known the spiritual one. This is what Auden wrote about the dining area in Thanksgiving for a habitat. Entitled “Tonight at seven-thirty”, after describing many details of the ideal party it  ends

… men

and women who enjoy the cloop of corks, appreciate

 dapatical fare, yet can see in swallowing  (Daps,- feast like)

  a sign act of reverence,

in speech a work of re-presenting

  the true olamic silence. [26]  (everlasting)

This is a truly sacramental view of existence in which the outward and visible can be a sign of the inward and spiritual, so swallowing is “a sign act of reverence”, and the table  talk a touch of the eternal. Other Christian poets, notably Thomas Traherne and Gerard Manley Hopkins  have celebrated the via positive, but none, I think, have done it in such a bold, inclusive and, well, utterly  worldly way, as W.H.Auden.

Eliot too was sacramental, but with a big qualification.  Geoffry Faber once wrote to him to chide him for having a too negative view of the good things in life. Eliot wrote an important letter back in which he argues first of all that we cannot distinguish sharply intellectual pleasures from sensual ones. They are often bound up.

My pleasures in dining have been pretty complex; it is not a simple matter to remember the pleasure of the canard aux oranges and distinguish it pleasure from the pleasure of ‘the Chambertin with the yellow seal on’ as Thackery would say.

Then he goes on to say that  if one has dispossessed oneself of all craving for created things, of all desire for pleasure, then one comes back  to them with an enhanced sense of enjoyment. ‘after this one returns ( I do anyway) to the canard aux oranges or the moules marinières or whatever it be with a keener pleasure…..If we are rightly directed, a good dinner can lead us towards God, and God can help us enjoy a good dinner.[27]

This is indeed a sacramental view of existence, it is truly to enjoy life, but Eliot’s qualification is crucial, the way of dispossession has to come first.

Although in terms of personal practice we can say that they both had a sacramental understanding of everyday pleasures, what they expressed in their poetry was different.

From a religious point of view they reveal two different approaches. Auden seeks to  celebrate what is there. Eliot sees in what exists a hint of something beyond what is there. Suppose Auden for example had been writing about the Mississippi of Dry Salvages, or the magical winter landscape at the beginning of Little Gidding, we can imagine the kind of witty exultation of praise which would come forth. But for Eliot as we know both landscapes are haunted by something else and the images point beyond themselves. 

Eliot believed that there was an ultimate happiness which lay beyond this present world but which could occasionally be glimpsed even now. For him those glimpses came in and through suffering. He wrote to Emily to say that his great delight was Beethoven’s A Minor quartet and he thought that Beethoven’s later music   had a supernatural gaiety about it, an angelic frivolity as of someone who had been through all human suffering and come out into another country ‘which I would give my life to be able to translate into poetry.’[28] That of course is what he tried to do in the Four Quartets.

Strictly speaking the via negative concerns language and prayer. We go into a kind of darkness in which we can only say what God is not.   Eliot however widens the idea out to stress that life in all its aspects goes into this darkness. In East Coker it is first of all the life of the village that ends in ‘Dung and death’, then all our attempts to put our experience into words fails and  every human status and reputation is  reduced to nothing: but this is the darkness of God. At this point the poem turns explicitly to the experience of prayer and the words of St John of the Cross about dispossession. At this point the darkness becomes light

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.

The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,

The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy.

This sense of haunting delight begins earlier, in Burnt Norton where it occurs whilst  looking into a pool in a rose-garden. The moment was fleeting. ‘Then a cloud passed and the pool was empty’ . ‘The black cloud carries the sun away’. The dominant image for this experience is light. Although the pool was empty it was filled with sunlight. ‘The surface glittered out of heart of light’. Later, the flash of a kingfisher’s wing brings it to mind for it answered ‘light to light’

The experience is tantalising. It cannot be grasped but it speaks of some ultimate ecstasy ‘the leaves were full of children,/hidden excitedly, containing laughter . In  section V in a shaft of sunlight hidden laughter rises from children hidden in the foliage.

In East Coker III , there is again laughter in the garden but this time with associated images of running streams, winter lightening, wild thyme unseen and wild strawberry. However the difficulty of the journey is never forgotten. The further union, the deeper communion comes

Through the dark cold and empty desolation

 In The Dry Salvages these moments are described as hints and guesses. There again sunlight, thyme and winter lightening appear  but music and a waterfall are now included in the list. Finally in the climax to Little Gidding the list is reduced to two, the voice of the hidden waterfall and children in the apple-tree.

Whilst Eliot in his personal life, like Auden, sought to make sensual pleasures sacramental, outward manifestations of spiritual realities, and in this sense found enjoyment in life, his prime purpose in Four Quartets is to see how some sensual pleasures can be echoes of an ultimate and lasting enjoyment -the excited laughter of Children in the apple trees, the sound of a hidden waterfall, the smell of thyme.

So we can think of Auden with his innate curiosity and zest for life exulting in  every aspect of creation, in his inimitable  witty way. And we can think of Eliot also enjoying the pleasures of life, especially good food, but only after he had first detached himself from any desire for them, only when he had gone the way of dispossession. But in his poetry we are taken beyond the pleasures of this life into a mystery that can only be hinted at. As he wrote in The Dry Salvages II

The moments of happiness-not the sense of well being,

Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,

Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination-

We had the experience but missed the meaning.

And approach to the experience restores the meaning

In a different form, beyond any meaning

We can assign to happiness.

But that is too high a note on which to close. In the end Eliot did find real enjoyment in life, genuine happiness at the age of 68 with Valerie. For eight years , always on the brink of death with emphysema and heart problems the raging beast was tamed into tenderness,  and the fastidious mind united with his senses to produce amongst other things a touching erotic poem to his beloved. We will leave them to continue to enjoy their communion at the heavenly banquet. We here below can follow Auden with the cloop of corks and Eliot with the Chambertin, or whatever the Society has in store for us. Auden encouraging us simply to relish and give thanks for what is set before us, Eliot reminding us that true enjoyment comes only if we have first detached ourselves from the desire for all sensual pleasures.

[1] For this relationship see Lyndall Gordon, The Hyacinth Girl: T. S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse, Virago 2022 and Sara Fitzgerald, The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T. S. Eliot and the Rose of a Lifetime, Rowman and Littlefield, 2024

[2] 12 March 1931

[3] 14 Feb 33. Unless otherwise stated all dates are references are to letters in  the digital edition of the Eliot-Hale letters freely available on the internet.

[4] 30 April 33

[5] Address to association of Unitarian Ministers, 3^rd April 1933, 1 April 33

[6] 6 Aug 34

[7] 20 Aug 34

[8] See Mary Trevelyan and Erica Wagner, Mary & Mr Eliot: A Sort of Love Story, Faber 2022.

[9] 19 Oct 34

[10] The Letters of T. S. Eliot ,vol 3:1926-1927, Ed Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, Faber 2012,  p710-12

[11] On that marriage from Vivien Eliot’s point of view see Ann Pasternak Slater, The Fall of a Sparrow, Vivien Eliot’s Life and Writings, Faber 2020

[12] Letters, vol 5, 2 June 1930, p.210

[13] 16 Feb 1931

[14] 25 March 35

[15] 5 March 36

[16] 14 Feb 33

[17] 13 Jan and 16 Jan 36

[18] 4 April 36

[19] 30 May 36

[20] 26 May 1931

[21] “ Epistle to a Godson”, CP.p.624

[22] “In Praise of Limestone”CP.  p.414

[23] “As I walked out one evneing”.CP p.114

[24] “Precious Five”, CP, p.447

[25] “The things which are Caesar’s”, Prose Vol III, p. 203

[26] “Tonight at Seven-thirty”, CP, p.533. Olam comes from the Hebrew, and combines that which is hidden with a vast period of time, so perhaps everlasting.

[27] Letters, vol 3, p711-13

[28] 16 March 1931