Table Of ContentT.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word
DOI: 10.1057/9781137381637
Also by G. Douglas Atkins
THE FAITH OF JOHN DRYDEN: Change and Continuity
READING DECONSTRUCTION/DECONSTRUCTIVE READING
WRITING AND READING DIFFERENTLY: Deconstruction and the Teaching of
Composition and Literature (co-edited with Michael L. Johnson)
QUESTS OF DIFFERENCE: Reading Pope’s Poems
SHAKESPEARE AND DECONSTRUCTION (co-edited with David M. Bergeron)
CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY (co-edited with Laura Morrow)
GEOFFREY HARTMAN: Criticism as Answerable Style
ESTRANGING THE FAMILIAR: Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing
TRACING THE ESSAY: Through Experience to Truth
READING ESSAYS: An Invitation
ON THE FAMILIAR ESSAY: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies
LITERARY PATHS TO RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats,
George Eliot, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and E.B. White
T.S. ELIOT AND THE ESSAY: From The Sacred Wood to Four Quartets
READING T.S. ELIOT: Four Quartets and the Journey toward Understanding
E.B. WHITE: The Essayist as First-Class Writer
T.S. ELIOT MATERIALIZED: Literal Meaning and Embodied Truth
SWIFT’S SATIRES ON MODERNISM: Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing
ALEXANDER POPE’S CATHOLIC VISION: “Slave to no sect”
T.S. ELIOT AND THE FAILURE TO CONNECT: Satire and Modern Misunderstandings
SWIFT, JOYCE, AND THE FLIGHT FROM HOME: Quests of Transcendence and the Sin
of Separation
DOI: 10.1057/9781137381637
T.S. Eliot, Lancelot
Andrewes, and the
Word: Intersections
of Literature and
Christianity
G. Douglas Atkins
DOI: 10.1057/9781137381637
t.s. eliot, lancelot andrewes, and the word
Copyright © G. Douglas Atkins, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-38965-7
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–1–137–38163–7 PDF
ISBN: 978–1-349-48250-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from
the Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
First edition: 2013
www.palgrave.com/pivot
doi: 10.1057/9781137381637
In memory of Millie,
Loving Cavalier
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Contents
Preface vii
1 On Reading and Incarnation 1
2 Eliot Reading Lancelot Andrewes 11
3 Homage to Lancelot Andrewes 20
4 The Voice of (An)other: Lancelot Andrewes
within and for Eliot’s Poems 46
5 “Sovegna vos” in Eliot’s Marian Poems:
Falsehood, Separation, and Ash-Wednesday 55
6 “Orare et laborare”: Suffer Not Separation
or Other Falsehoods 75
Bibliography 83
Index 86
vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137381637
Preface
“The hint half guessed, the gift half understood,” wrote
T.S. Eliot in “The Dry Salvages,” third of Four Quartets, “is
Incarnation.” For him, as it was for Lancelot Andrewes,
who was so influential on both his thinking and his art,
and as it was for the Anglo-Catholicism that he identified
as his religious affiliation in 1928, “the fullness of Christian
revelation resides in the essential fact of the Incarnation,”
a strong and unequivocal statement. Eliot wrote of Bishop
Andrewes that the Incarnation was “an essential dogma,”
and it certainly appears prominently in the great sermons
of the important Divine, at least seventeen of which were
preached on the Nativity.
Surprisingly, Eliot’s “intersections” with Bishop Andrewes,
and his debt to him and his writings, have never been satis-
factorily treated (Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism has, however, just
recently [2010] and well been studied by Barry Spurr, whom
I have already quoted above). In particular, the verbal, com-
parative, and meditative character of Eliot’s poetry has been
neither adequately covered nor closely enough related to the
same qualities in Andrewes’s sermons: “the exploitation of
semantic, grammatical, and syntactical analyses, as well as
verbal parallelisms, plays on words, and striking paradoxical
formulations” (Nicholas Lossky, on Bishop Andrewes). In
this little book, I leap in where angels have perhaps feared to
tread. In addition, I make central, based on this very approach
to reading Eliot (and Andrewes), the precise dimensions
of the sentence, in “The Dry Salvages,” with which I began
this preface: not only does the repeated word “half” matter
as indicative of our inability to grasp the “impossible union”
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viii Preface
that the predicate identifies, nor thus to “amalgamat[e the] disparate expe-
rience” in that “intersection” of transcendence and immanence, spirit and
flesh, the Divine nature and the human, but Eliot also omits the expected
definite article before the key noun. “Incarnation” is, I argue, the paradig-
matic instance of the timeless and universal pattern that occurred in history
with the birth, life, and death of Christ Jesus.
I have intended this book for nonspecialist and specialist readers alike.
And as close as I am to my subject(s), I claim, pretend to, and desire
no identity with them. As Old Possum and Bishop Andrewes tirelessly
suggest, reading is an intersection of text and reader. That fact, too, is
a gift often at least but half understood. What I have sought here is an
“impossible union” of essayistic manner and scholarly truth.
I have written this little book, not really as an introduction to Eliot,
his most cherished ideas, and the pattern governing the difficult move-
ment of the words in his poems, but as a clear invitation to the reader,
engraved: whoever you are. I have sought, by various means (including
the avoidance of as many notes as possible), to bring you into Eliot’s
writing. I will be content if my announcements of our communion par-
ticipate, however minimally and preliminarily, in that reality figured in
and by “the gift half understood.”
I opted, a half-century ago, for the critical vocation rather than the
(merely) clerical. Although I occasionally still experience a regret or
two, even some doubt, and increasing skepticism about the state and
character of the profession I entered, I know I made the right choice.
Simply put, you go through texts, the word the path to the Word. There
is quite enough to do reading the words well, clearing debris, wrestling
with falsehood, and trying it all over (again) in words, my words.
Literature may very well be modernity’s replacement for theology.
Not religion, note, but that intellectual and academic discipline that has
become so complex that nobody other than a few specialists can, or will,
read it. Sort of like literary criticism. Literature is the place you start
from, although you expand your interests. It is fundamental because
reading literature responsibly and well requires of the reader more than
use of her or his reason; imagination is centrally involved, along (then)
with feeling, the full human sensibility, in fact. The future of theology
(still) lies in literature.
Literature gives us “insight” and “wisdom,” the two things, Eliot
lamented, missing in modern philosophical writing. Theology, like recent
philosophy, requires not a saint to understand but a professional. Eliot’s
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Preface ix
words, though, are for the laity, the amateurs, if you will, readers who
are flesh-and-blood and who react and respond to words that the Word
respects for their indirectness. It is the human that the poet deals with.
The point points to the compound, but it is also familiar. The dead are
indeed “tongued with fire,” the other necessary for our seeing and closer
contact.
Humility resides in criticism’s role—as stated by Georg Lukács in 1910,
in an essay modestly offered as a letter—as a John-the-Baptist kind of
effort. Its primary task is to read responsibly—it by no means diminishes
its importance to acknowledge that we can never quite say precisely in
what all this consists. Reading well is an art, not a science, and it involves,
always, two, text and reader coming together, indeed intersecting (at the
point that defines reading).
Reading is, to say it again, a necessary first step; it is frankly instru-
mental, even if it produces its own satisfactions. You have to read the
poem as poem—we must, thus, return not merely to close reading but
to reading that respects the integrity of the text as made thing. We have,
moreover, to get it right before we move on—faring forward, always—to
ideas, issues, and the ultimate questions that only religion raises and
sometimes answers.
Reading well is difficult. Writing about reading—which is both the
difference that reading makes and what criticism is, although it is often
reduced to writing about a text or texts—is an awesome responsibility. I
find the attempt to do that more satisfying than anything else I know.
The young Alexander Pope perhaps said it best—it is a needed,
humbling recognition, for he was then no more than 21—in An Essay
on Criticism 300 years ago: made of “A Knowledge both of Books and
Humankind,” criticism is, and has to be, “Gen’rous Converse” (641). He said
this, too: read “each Work of Wit/ With the same Spirit that its Author
writ” (233–34) And this: never “in the Critick let the Man be lost!” (523).
I am happy once more to acknowledge my longstanding and continu-
ing debt to my lovely and loving wife Rebecca, my children (of whom
I could not possibly be prouder) Leslie and Christopher, their children
Kate and Oliver, and their spouses Craig and Sharon. While I was writ-
ing this book, we lost our beloved King Charles Cavalier Millie, to whom
I dedicate this effort: Anglophile to Royalist. I am happy to acknowledge
my considerable debt to Bruce Bond, who read the typescript with
consummate care, made many astute observations, and offered words of
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