The Life and Art of Andrey Tarkovsky

Part II

Romanov, Yermash, Sisov and all those within the decaying soviet totalitarian system were bereft of ideas and their only guiding principle was to try and not make mistakes which superiors might deem contrary to Bolshevism – which they themselves probably did not even understand. The removal of Romanov was just one symptom of this.

Out of these early contradictions and the pressures with which Tarkovsky had to contend to get his films made, he forged the artistic and creative principles by which he knew he had to work. In 1970 he wrote:

One doesn’t need a lot to be able to live. The great thing is to be free in your work. Of course it’s important to print or exhibit, but if that’s not possible you still are left with the most important thing of all – being able to work without asking anybody’s permission. However, in cinema that is not possible. You can’t take a single shot unless the State graciously allows you to. Still less could you use your own money. That would be viewed as robbery, ideological aggression, subversion.

Stalker, Tarkovsky’s last film made in the Soviet Union, is based on Roadside Picnic, a story by the Strugatsky brothers. But in Tarkovsky’s hands it probes the depths of what the film-maker saw as the fundamental crises of the modern world: the rift between natural science and belief; the future of mankind living with the atomic bomb; and, ultimately, the dim glimmer of hope still left to man.

The dream sequence in Stalker

What these four films (Andrey Rublev, Solaris, Mirror and Stalker) up to this point revealed – and his enemies in the system sensed this, but did not understand it – was Tarkovsky’s Christian faith and his realisation of the totally corrupting influence of Marxist materialism. Mirror, so beautiful but equally obscure to them, was more personal. But they also hated it. However, by now his international acclaim was such a huge factor that their obnoxious treatment had to be camouflaged.

In his diaries at that time he revealed his soul and his devastating critique of the system he lived under.

By virtue of the infinite laws, or the laws of infinity that lie beyond what we can reach, God cannot but exist. For man, who is unable to grasp the essence of what lies beyond, the unknown – the unknowable is GOD. And in a moral sense, God is love.

His reading of Marxism and the faltering regime he had to try to live and work under is summed up as follows:

Man is estranged. It might seem that a common cause could become the basis of a new community; but that is a fallacy. People have been stealing and playing the hypocrite for the last fifty years, united in their sense of purpose, but with no community. People can only be united in a common cause if that cause is based on morality and is within the realm of the ideal, of the absolute…Because each one only loves himself… Community is an illusion, as a result of which sooner or later there will rise over the continent evil, deadly, mushroom clouds…An agglomeration of people aiming at one thing – filling their stomachs – is doomed to destruction, decay, hostility. 

‘Not by bread alone,’ he concluded.

Elsewhere he said, materialism – naked and cynical – is going to complete the destruction.

Despite the fact that God lives in every soul, that every soul has the capacity to accumulate what is eternal and good, as a mass people can do nothing but destroy. For they have come together not in the name of an ideal, but simply for the sake of a material notion… Man has simply been corrupted…. Those who thought about the soul have been – and still are being – physically eliminated.

In watching a Tarkovsky film one has to take note of the way in which he wants viewers to respond. In this we are not far from Christopher Nolan’s expectations of his audiences. Nolan Admired Tarkovsky and his work, and particularly Mirror.

Tarkovsky described what he saw as a basic principle of film-making… the mainspring is, I think, that as little as possible has actually to be shown, and from that little the audience has to build up an idea of the rest, of the whole. In my view that has to be the basis for constructing the cinematographic image. And if one looks at it from the point of view of symbols, then the symbol in cinema is a symbol of nature, of reality. Of course it isn’t a question of details, but of what is hidden.

Like Nolan, Tarkovsky makes demands on his audience. Viewers have to, as it were, learn a cinematic language which mainstream Hollywood does not teach or even know.

The battles for distribution continued with Yermash. But there were some signs of a thaw and Tarkovsky was eventually able to make two films abroad, one in Italy and one in Sweden.

He began to see his battles as a cross Christ asked him to bear. He wrote of the Cross and identified his woes with Christ’s Cross. At one point he saw himself facing two years of misery: with Andriushka at school; and Marina, and Mother, and Father. It is going to be hell for them. What can I do? Only pray! And believe.The most important thing of all is…to have faith in spite of everything, to have faith.

We are crucified on one plane, while the world is many-dimennional. We are aware of that and are tormented by our inability to know the truth. But there is no need to know it! We need to love. And to believe, Faith is knowledge with the help of love.

Tarkovsky was allowed to travel to Italy in the 1980s to shoot Nostalgia. This was a Soviet-Italian co-production. The theme is, however, typical of the Russian dilemma: that of the artist abroad, smitten by homesickness, unable to live in his country or away from it — the very fate that befell Tarkovsky himself in the last years of his life. It was even more painful still for him because the authorities restricted the movement of his family and starved him of financial support. It was not until the end of his life that they allowed his young son, Andriushka, to be with him.

His time in Italy in 1980, apart from the creative work he did there on Nostalgia, was spiritually enriching for him. Two extraordinary events in particular highlight this. One was his visit to the Holy House in Loreto. Of this he recorded something very personal in his diary.

An amazing thing happened to me today. We were in Loreto where there is a famous cathedral (rather like Lourdes) in the middle of which stands the house in which Jesus was born (sic), transported here from Nazareth. While we were in the cathedral, I felt it was wrong that I can’t pray in a Catholic cathedral; not that I cannot, but that I don’t want to. It is, after all, alien to me. Then later, quite by chance, we went into a little seaside town called Porto Nuovo, and into its small, tenth century cathedral. And what should I see on the altar but the Vladimir Mother of God.

Apparently some Russian painter had, at some time, given the church this copy of the Mother of God of Vladimir, evidently painted by him.

I couldn’t believe it: suddenly to see an Orthodox ikon in a Catholic country, when I had just been thinking about not being able to pray at Loreto.

It was wonderful.

The second event he recorded as follows:

Today I relaxed while Tonino finished dictating his script. I went to St. Peter’s Square. I saw and heard the Pope’s appearance in front of the people-the crowd filled the entire square with flags, banners and placards. It’s odd that although I was surrounded simply by large numbers of curious people, such as foreigners and tourists, there was a unity about them which impressed me deeply.

There was something natural, organic in it all. It was obvious that all these people had come here of their own free will. The atmosphere reigning in the Square made that perfectly clear.

I also felt it was wonderful that as I was wandering round the streets, before going by chance into St. Peter’s Square, I had been thinking that today was Sunday and what fun it would be when I got back to Moscow to be able to say that I had been present at a Papal audience at the Vatican. 

He also recorded some moments of prayer in his diaries. One such was this conversation with God:

Lord! I feel You drawing near, I can feel Your hand upon the back of my head. Because I want to see Your world as You made it, and Your people as You would have them be. I love You, Lord, and want nothing else from You. I accept all that is Yours, and only the weight of my malice and my sins, the darkness of my base soul, prevent me from being Your worthy slave, O Lord!

These thoughts of death – he was never really in good health – were noted when he was battling with the authorities over the content of Stalker, a film in which the protagonist seeks unsuccessfully to open the minds of his two pilgrim companions to the meaning of our existence:

If God takes me to himself I am to have a church funeral and be buried in the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery. It will be difficult to get permission. And no one is to mourn! They must believe that I am better off where I am. The picture is to be finished according to the pattern we decided for the music and sound. Lucia must try and tidy up the end of the bar scene. ‘The Room’ should include the new text from the notebook (the sick child) plus the old one, written for the scene after the ‘Dream’. 

At the end of 1985, after the release of Nostalgia, again to international acclaim, he completed the shooting of his last film, The Sacrifice, in Sweden. Described as a parable by Tarkovsky, the story revolves around a family awaiting an impending nuclear catastrophe in a remote Scandinavian seaside location. The paterfamilias prays and offers himself to God as a sacrificial victim to save the world from the impending disaster. It is a profoundly mysterious, reflective and beautiful work, regarded by some as the artist’s masterpiece.

 Andrey Tarkovsky returned to Rome after completing it. Already afflicted by the cancer to which he succumbed a year later, he died on 29 December 1986, at a Parisian clinic. His last diary entry was made on 15 December. He is buried in a graveyard for Russian émigrés in the town of Saint-Geneviève-du-Bois, France.

The Extraordinary Life and Art of Andrey Tarkovsky

Part I

What is it about Russia? What is it about her creative artists? To a man they love their country but to a man – with very few exceptions – particularly for the past century – they have been persecuted by their country’s rulers. Her great composers in the modern age, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, had to tread very carefully and tailor their work to please the political masters. Her great ballet artists had to flee Russia to express their genius freely. Above all, her great writers of the past hundred years suffered unspeakable indignities. Even today the number one persona non grata is Mikahil Bulgakov even though he died over 70 years ago. Why? Because ordinary Russians are flocking to cinemas to see a film version of his magnificent anti-Stalinist novel, The Master and Margarita. This has been made by an expat Russian and is now being interpreted as an anti-Putin satire.

Hannah Arendt, in her master work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, while recognising the post Stalinist communist system as one of dictatorship, did not see it in 1966  as totalitarianism. It lacked the quality of complete domination and while vicious, was but a crumbling edifice, a shadow of its former self.

Arendt wrote in 1966:

“The clearest sign that the Soviet Union can no longer be called totalitarian in the strict sense of the term is, of course, the amazingly swift and rich recovery of the arts during the last decade. To be sure, efforts to rehabilitate Stalin and to curtail the increasingly vocal demands for freedom of speech and thought among students, writers, and artists recur again and again, but none of them has been very successful or is likely to be successful without a full-fledged re-establishment of terror and police rule. 

“No doubt, the people of the Soviet Union are denied all forms of political freedom, not only freedom of association but also freedom of thought, opinion and public expression. It looks as though nothing has changed, while in fact everything has changed. When Stalin died the drawers of writers and artists were empty; today there exists a whole literature that circulates in manuscript and all kinds of modern painting are tried out in the painters’ studios and become known even though they are not exhibited.”

In the world of creative cinema, one of the saddest stories of all is that of Andrey Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky was born on 4 April 1932, probably the darkest decade in Soviet history. His mother, Maria Ivanovna, was a talented actress, and his father, Arseniy Tarkovsky, a respected poet and translator. Both his parents have featured in his work. His mother had a central role in his masterpiece, Mirror. The haunting poems of his father were used in several of his films.

In addition to regular classes at school he began to study music and drawing. In 1954 he successfully applied for admission to the prestigious All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow.

Tarkovsky’s first major feature film, Ivan’s Childhood, was shown in Moscow in April 1962. This was a haunting and tragic story, beginning idyllically in pre-World War II Russia and then descending into horrors of that war. The story focuses on the evil of war and how it turns Ivan’s childhood into a monstrous nightmare.The film won the Venice Festival’s Golden Lion in that year and drew the attention of the world to the thirty-year-old director.

It also drew the attention of the Soviet authorities, creating an expectation that here was an artist who could serve their propaganda purposes. They were to be bitterly disappointed. The long and bitter harassment of Tarkovsky began at this point. His diaries, dating from 1970 up to just a couple of weeks before his early death in 1986, record the details of this struggle, as well as the creative instincts and the deep religious consciousness from which they sprang. That this consciousness could be nurtured by his mother in the terrifying environment of Stalinist Russia is one of the most extraordinary things about this man.

The trouble began around the end of 1966, with the begrudging release of his second film, the three-hour long Andrey Rublev. Initially his ideological masters did not seem to know what to make of it. But soon the penny dropped. It attracted international attention and with the critical interpretation of its themes, the apparatchiks realised they had a problem on their hands. They still wanted him to work for them, but on their terms. This effectively turned his working life into something like a living hell. 

Andrey Ruble

Of his battle to have the film released he wrote:

Late yesterday evening E. D. rang and said that Chernoutsan just telephoned him: Suslov signed the document for the release of Rublev immediately after the Congress. I must find out from K straightaway which cinemas and how many copies. Of course the Committee insists on cuts.  I’ll tell them to go to hell. So I must contact A. N. Kosygin as soon as possible. He apparently wanted to meet and spoke highly of the film.

Kosygin was Russian Prime Minister from 1964 to 1980.

Andrey Rublev is structured in three parts and features the life and work of the great Russian icon painter of that name. One of his most famous icons is that of the Blessed Trinity. The central section depicts the struggles of the early evangelisers of Russia and their battles with the remnants of paganism. The last symbolic section shows the battle of a small Christian community to restore a bell to their church. This bell had to be built in a makeshift foundry and could only be done by a young boy who was the last person alive who knew the secret of how to do this. It is an utterly dramatic and moving sequence, clearly symbolic of the hopes of a Christian future for Russia.

The first article about the film in Russia appeared in Komsomolskaya Pravda. “A nasty little piece,” Tarkovsky commented, “which will have the effect of bringing the public to see the film. There is no announcement in any paper about Rublev being on. Not a single poster in the city. Yet it’s impossible to get tickets”. 

When Rublev was eventually shown in Sweden, Ingmar Bergman said it was the best film he had ever seen. He is reported to have watched it ten times. In an interview Bergman described Tarkovsky as the best contemporary director, superior even to Fellini.

Andrey Rublev, which was shown out of competition at the Cannes Festival in 1966, and won an award there, was only cleared for export by the Soviets in 1973. Similarly Mirror, completed in 1974 against strong bureaucratic resistance, reached west European cinemas only years later. Mirror is a deeply moving reflection of the life and travails of Tarkovsky’s own family.

With Solaris, made over 1971/1972, based on a science fiction novel by Polish writer, Stanislas Lem, Tarkovsky touched upon a subject that seemed relatively innocuous in the Soviet Union at the time – man forging ahead into space. But even here his approach generated a long list of criticisms and objections. This was because in his hands it was not just a science fiction work but a deep exploration of a man grappling with his conscience.

The Central Committee attempted to destroy Solaris.

Tarkovsky made a note of some thirty-three cuts they demanded but which he considered would destroy the whole basis of the film. “In other words, it’s even more absurd than it was with Rublev.” Among the alterations they demanded were the following:

There ought to be a clearer image of the earth of the future. (Presumably a communist future).

Cut out the concept of God. 

Cut out the concept of Christianity. 

The conference. Cut out the foreign executives.

He wrote in desperation, Am I really going to be sitting around again for years on end, waiting for somebody graciously to let my film through?

What an extraordinary country this is? Don’t they want an international artistic triumph, don’t they want us to have good new films and books? They are frightened by real art. Quite under-standably. Art can only be bad for them because it is humane, whereas their purpose is to crush everything that is alive, every shoot of humanity, any aspiration to freedom, any manifestation of art on our dreary horizon. They won’t be content until they have eliminated every symptom of independence and reduced people to the level of cattle.

In the end he decided to make just those alterations that were consistent with his own plans and would not destroy the fabric of the film.

Then something like a miracle happened which he described as follows:

Romanov came to the studio on the 29th and Solaris was accepted without a single alteration. Nobody can believe it. They say that the agreement accepting the film is the only one to be signed personally by Romanov. Someone must have put the fear of God into him.

I heard that Sizov showed the film to three officials whose names we don’t know and who are in charge of the academic and technological side of things; and their authority is too great for their opinion to be ignored. It’s nothing short of miraculous, one can even begin to believe that all will be well.

In the next act in the drama Aleksey Romanov was removed and replaced by another equally opaque apparatchik. F. T. Yermash. He was to be Tarkovsky’s nemesis for the remainder of his career.

Part II next week.

Endgame or Game On?

Endgame? Part II

In the hope of finding some glimmer of hope and optimism in the face of what looks like catastrophic population decline I went to the ideas of Alasdair McIntyre in his famous book, After Virtue. For it seemed to me that while Klein and Sciubba talked about values, those values only floated in a vague soup of feelings and nothing more. While their analysis and searching for answers remain in the realm of the moral framework of the emotivism which MacIntyre finds at the heart of modernity, they will get nowhere. We have no reason to doubt their good intentions or their sincerity, but are they unwitting victims – as our culture in general is – of the disastrous philosophical turning which occurred after the Renaissance and on into the Enlightenment? The only virtue people seem to talk about in the contemporary context is that barren species known as ‘virtue signalling’. There is a cliche that tells us that ‘ideas have consequences’. They do but they often do so without people realising that the consequences they are suffering, or are about to suffer, are rooted in false ideas.

Alasdair MacIntyre casts light on the darkness confronting our race in two ways. The first does not offer much solace. It envisions the collapse of all that we take for granted in our civilization.

He does this in terms of an allegory suggestive of the premise of the science-fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz: a world where all sciences have been dismantled quickly and almost entirely. MacIntyre asks what the sciences would look like if they were re-assembled from the remnants of scientific knowledge that survived the catastrophe. 

From his extrapolation of that allegory we may extrapolate something about our own demographic predicament: The grim effect of catastrophic population collapse will be the inevitable destruction of the infrastructure which in material terms sustains our comfortable way of life, ultimately perhaps descending into a variation of the kind of unexplained chaos depicted by Cormac McCarthy in The Road.

We already know what a shortage of competent and trained workers means for our daily life and comfort. “I just can’t find a plumber to repair that leaking valve”.

Again extrapolating from the theses of After Virtue, we can find the roots of our demographic predicament in corrupt philosophy.

“The hypothesis which I wish to advance”, MacIntyre argues, “is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described.” He holds that the moral structures that emerged from the Enlightenment were philosophically doomed from the start because they were formed using an incoherent language of morality. In abandoning Aristotelian teleology – the view that only by contemplating mankind in terms of its purpose and its end, and these as the foundation for the moral life – philosophy took a disastrous wrong turn. 

He argues that when we abandoned the idea that human life had a proper end or character we were heading into a dark and confused place. Individualism and emotivism were going to be the ruling principles of what we might call our morality. 

The Enlightenment  ascribed moral agency to the individual. He claims this made morality no more than one man’s opinion.  Philosophy became a forum of inexplicably subjective rules and principles. From this stems the now dominant moral principle of emotivism. We, in our time, now see that it is from this source that the virus of wokism flows  – which is nothing more or less than a deranged moral code. Where that will lead remains to be seen. It may die as most ideologies do, but as long as emotivism remains supreme, worse may follow.

In his critique of capitalism, the bureaucratic state, and its associated liberal and Enlightenment-inspired ideology, he defends ordinary social “practices”and the “goods internal” to practices, much as Edmund Burke did in his critique of the ideology of the French Revolution. MacIntyre argues that pursuit of these practices helps to give narrative structure and intelligibility to our lives. What we have to do is ensure that these goods are defended against their corruption by “institutions”, which pursue such “external goods” as money, power and status.

MacIntyre’s vision, while somewhat dark, is not pessimistic – because he has a Christian vision of our existence. He tells us that we are waiting not for Godot but for Benedict of Nursia. MacIntyre sees morals and virtues as only comprehensible through their relation to the community which they come from – echoes of Burke again. True virtue is rooted in knowing who we are and where we come from. 

It also must carry within it something of the value of sacrifice. I write this on Thursday of Holy Week, the day on which the Eucharist  was given by Christ to his disciples for the first time, he himself, Body and Blood, soul and divinity. As I do, I recall words from G. M. Hopkins’ translation of Aquinas’ great Eucharistic hymn, Adoro Te Devote:

O thou our reminder of Christ crucified,

Living Bread, the life of us for whom he died,

Lend this life to me then: feed and feast my mind,

There be thou the sweetness man was meant to find.

Many years ago Romano Guardini wrote:

“How great is the transformation of our conception of man through Christianity. It is something we are again beginning to appreciate, now that its validity is no longer generally accepted. Perhaps the moment is not distant in which the Christian ideal, like that of antiquity during the Renaissance, will overwhelm the modern consciousness with its unspeakable plenitude.” (Guardini, The Lord).

We do not need to relocate to Monte Casino to live with this vision. We are, as people of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, people who believe in Divine Goodness, Justice and Mercy, called by God to live here and now in this real world and with this Spirit. Only by doing so will we live our lives with the sense of, and commitment to, priorities, often involving a spirit of sacrifice, which will ensure the fruitfulness mandated for us by our Creator. Thus, and thus only, will we avert the impending disaster threatening our race.

The Lancet reported recently on a study about  the low-fertility future. The interpretation of the study which it offered made sobering reading, much as did the conversation between Ezra Klein and Jennifer Sciubba. 

Fertility is declining globally, with rates in more than half of all countries and territories in 2021 below replacement level. Trends since 2000 show considerable heterogeneity in the steepness of declines, and only a small number of countries experienced even a slight fertility rebound after their lowest observed rate, with none reaching replacement level. Additionally, the distribution of live births across the globe is shifting, with a greater proportion occurring in the lowest-income countries. Future fertility rates will continue to decline worldwide and will remain low even under successful implementation of pro-natal policies. These changes will have far-reaching economic and societal consequences due to ageing populations and declining workforces in higher-income countries, combined with an increasing share of live births among the already poorest regions of the world.

In 1985 the great Russian film director, Andrey Tarkovsky, made his last film, just before his untimely death. It was called The Sacrifice and centered on a man offering his life to save a world threatened by imminent nuclear catastrophe. Mankind has to stop thinking that anything good can be achieved without a spirit of sacrifice. Without sacrifice there is no love and without love there will be no future worth talking about..

Endgame?

This is the way the world ends  

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Unless… Unless what? The problem is, we cannot give a coherent answer to that question. The truth is we seem not to know even how to begin to answer that question. That is, the agencies which try to govern our destinies on this planet, our governments, our academics, our experts, do not know, have not got the slightest idea of what to do to head off that “whimper”.

Ezra Klein, columnist with the New York Times, one of their best, and Jennifer Sciubba, distinguished demographer, began a heavyweight discussion on the columnist’s NYT based The Ezra Klein Show recently. They grappled with a frightening prospect for humanity – nothing less than what looks like the impending collapse of our civilisation.

Klein began, “So, tell me what ‘the total fertility rate’ is?”

Sciubba explained that the total fertility rate is — “let’s just say it’s the average number of children born per woman in her lifetime.” 

Klein then went on to say that when he listens to the conversation about total fertility rates, there are two conversations going on at the same time. One on the left is that it’s way too high. There are too many people. The other conversation is about how critically low it is and that we’re facing “a demographic bust. We’re going to see population collapse. We are a planet growing old, certainly a bunch of countries growing old.” 

They left aside the first conversation and focused on the second. They talked about the consequences of the fact that women have, on average, worldwide, about 2.2 children these days. Sciubba explained that basically, that is the replacement level. But then she said that in this century so far, we are in a global demographic divide. For example, the area in the world where it really is the highest is in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, over five children per woman on average.

But while there’s a divide, she said, the bottom line is that we’re all moving in the same direction. In the second part of the century, that’s really where we’re all going to start converging down at those lower levels. 

Klein then asked her how true the statement was that as countries get richer and more educated, their fertility rate drops. “Partially true” was her answer because there are “huge” examples where that has not been the case. “Huge” as in India. India is already really below replacement level for the whole country.

She cited Paul Ehrlich’s opening to his 1968 book, Population Bomb. He recalled a trip to India. There were people everywhere, people on the streets, people eating, people drinking, people sleeping, people, people, people. “And now, those people have a total fertility rate below replacement level. And India is not a wealthy country.” 

But they agreed that in general if a country has gotten richer, and that country is highly educated, highly literate, it is wealthy, that generally allows you to predict with a high level of certainty that this country is probably going to have a low fertility rate, probably below replacement level.

They were baffled by this “slightly mysterious” (Klein’s phrase) thing at the heart of their conversation. Why is it a demographic fact that when you look around the world, rich countries, more educated countries have fewer children? Why does wealth lead to fewer children?

They then moved from the focus on material well-being and began to talk about human values and the tremendous shift in values and norms across western societies. Sciubba then got personal and almost went to confession:

“And so, I think about my own life. So I have two children. And I have values beyond just wanting those children. Sorry to them if they listen to this. Thank goodness, they probably won’t, till they’re older. I do value my free time. I do value a nice meal at a restaurant. I value time with friends, time with my spouse, et cetera, et cetera. I value my career. And I value time with them the most. But you know what? It does compete for time.” 

Klein agreed but put it a little differently. “As countries become richer and more educated, they become more individualistic. And when you’re more individualistic, and people are making decisions more about their life, their self-expression, their set of choices,… then, children are one choice competing among many.”

They didn’t say this but it comes down to “freedom” of choice, “freedom” for choice. Ultimately it is about how we understand freedom.

So, on a personal level it all seems to come down to the choices people are offered by our society and our economic circumstances. As a society we expect to be able to make our choices freely and at the end of the day it is our personal value system which will guide us – or be a moral imperative for us – in making those choices. That, however, offers no solution to the demographic winter which our world faces.

They then considered the powerful impact of societal cultural values on all this – clearly implying that while people might feel they are acting freely in all the decisions they make, their freedom is much more limited than they think, limited by the norms prevailing in their communities.

They then nuanced their view of how much real freedom they might actually be enjoying.

Klein reflected that if he had told his parents that he was going to have kids at 24, they would wonder what went wrong with birth control. “We’d have been the only ones in our friend group with kids at that point. And so, there is this way in which, yes, there’s a lot of individualism, but the individualism also has very potent cultural grooves, right? You’re supposed to go and get education, and then more education and then more education, and then establish yourself in your career and be financially in a good spot, and of course, be married.

“And by the time you’ve done all that, you might be 30. You might be 32. You might be 36. And even if you wanted to have three or four kids at that point, you do end up running, particularly for women, into a biological clock problem.”

Sciubba drew from this observation the consequence that the total fertility rate for the U.S., writ large, is about 1.6 to 1.7 children per woman. Below replacement level. For the more education the lower it is on average. However she also pointed out that the gap with highly educated and less highly educated is not that big anymore.

They then moved to look at what we might call the global picture and how state policy – or any other agency’s policy – might shift us from a path which many see as a path of self-annihilation.

Is this really something that is amenable to policy change, though? Klein asked. “One of the things that is most striking to me about the data here…is that across many different kinds of societies, including some that have seen this as a crisis for their country for some time — I think here of Japan, I think here of South Korea — the ability to shift this through policy — and people have tried a lot of different things and a lot of different kinds of messaging and tax incentives and this and that — it doesn’t really seem like anything has worked.”

“And in the most extreme cases — again, I think here of South Korea, which I believe is now below total fertility rate of one, so I mean, you’re entering geometric decline — they’ve not been able to turn that around…Some of the extreme cases, like some of these East Asian countries” now see this as a genuine threat?

Klein and Sciubba then go on a virtual tour of the world to find a country which has tackled its demographic decline successfully. Depressingly, nothing seems to work. 

Sweden, which I visited last summer and where I was impressed by the evidence I saw of young families – and was told that Sweden is the best country in Europe in which to have children because of all the benefits offered. But all this is to no avail in bringing their fertility rate to or above replacement level.

The demographic “engineers” are trying to raise fertility rates to replacement level and trying to create what Sciubba describes as this nice stovepipe age structure. In this you get a steady number of people being born, aging into the workforce and aging out, without any scramble to build kindergartens or scramble to pay for Social Security.

Dream on.

The conclusion of their virtual tour is that we really don’t have societies that hang out there at replacement level. Once they tend to fall below it, they tend to stay there. 

Klein asks how do you get a population, if you’re a state, to have fertility rates that go back up above replacement level? “Well, you can strip away individual rights.” He hastens to add that he is not advocating this. Some totalitarian regimes tried and one succeeded monstrously – that of Nicolai Ceausescu in communist Romania. “So, no,” he concludes, “we do not really have examples where a society goes way below and then comes back up to above replacement level and hangs out there, and everyone is happy.”

No one thinks that the Ceausescu road is the one we will be travelling! But what road will we be traveling? Neither Klein nor Sciubba, with the best will in the world, really have any suggestions.  It appears that the modern world, in its modernity or postmodernity incarnations, as regards this impending threat is just stumped? 

In Part II of this article, next week, we will look at Alasdair MacIntyre’s seminal work, After Virtue, which traces false ideas which have colonised our culture and are conceivably at the root of this predicament.

Parts I and II will appear in the print and online summer editions (May and June/July) of Position Papers Review.

A Howling Emptiness

Is this a metaphor for the narcissistic destruction of our civilisation ?

A website, Hyperallergic, suggests that one of the fastest-growing threats to museum collections may not be, as some members of the public think, climate protesters wielding canned foods, but a scourge of selfie-takers backing into paintings and other objects. It seems many visitors are increasingly more interested in strutting vaingloriously before a masterpiece than in having an ecstatic art experience. Art insurers are worried about this and are looking at ways to tighten up policies and  promote more rigorous protections.

A few years ago a visitor to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge smashed a few precious Chinese vases to smithereens because he tripped on his shoelace as he descended the stairwell where they were on display. That was very unfortunate – and very embarrassing for the untidy individual – but it was a once-off hazard which taught the museum a thing or two about risky displays.

“It strikes us as something that’s becoming a growing trend,” Robert Read, head of Fine Art and Private clients at the Hiscox insurance company, told Hyperallergic. “We’re not going to change the whole way we underwrite, but it’s something that’s becoming concerning for museums and other public spaces, as well.” There was a confirmed selfie-related incident in 2017 that broke a Yayoi Kusama pumpkin sculpture in one of the artist’s notoriously selfie-friendly Infinity Mirrors rooms. 

But the more chilling dimension of all this is the reminder of how our narcissistic enslavement to electronic devices and the ancillary objects that go with them now seems to be corrupting the sensitivity which should leave us in awe of great art.

Walter Benjamin is famous for, among other things, the statement that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” His Marxist reading of history has, of course, to be read judiciously.  But there is no doubt that our fallen nature has mixed barbarism with the legacies of our culture and civilisation for millennia. However, the greatest danger we face today is that the documents of our civilisation are being confined for safe keeping to the vaults of our brutalist buildings, at best, and at worst to the rubbish dump by the growing phalanxes of woke narcissists.

Ignorance of history, blindness to truth and beauty are among the greatest afflictions of our age. Marilynne Robinson observed, in an essay in her collection,The Death of Adam:

“We are forever drawing up indictments against the past, then refusing to let it testify in its own behalf – it is so very guilty, after all. Such attention as we give to it is usually vindictive and incurious and therefore incompetent.” In many of the judgments which we pass on the events and characters which we disapprove of in the past, she finds clear evidence of our collective eagerness to disparage, without knowledge or information, just to be rewarded with the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.”

Narcissism is at the heart of this malaise.

Sam Vaknin is an Israeli born psychologist and a pioneering expert on the study of narcissism. He is Professor of Psychology at the Centre for International Advanced and Professional Studies and is author of the bestselling book Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited.

Narcissism is on the rise, he writes. He maintains that our civilization is elevating the self into the highest object of love and that a new strain of narcissism is morphing into a religion which threatens to consume not just narcissists, but everything else around them. He argues “that unless we tame and control our narcissism, the consequences for our culture could be devastating.”

Somewhat alarmingly, Vaknin argues that our civilisation rewards narcissism and veers towards it. The allure of this strange religion is growing exponentially, in his view. “It is beginning to be widely and counterfactually glamorized – even in academe – as a positive adaptation. Counterfactually because narcissism ineluctably and invariably devolves into self-defeat and self-destruction. 

The salutary mythological tale of Narcissus, we should remember, suffered that same fate.

Vaknin sees narcissism essentially as an illness which develops as a set of complex defences against childhood abuse and trauma in all its forms. By abuse he means not only “classical” maltreatment, but also idolizing the child, smothering it, parentifying it, or instrumentalizing it, all essentially forms of child abuse.

As the subject of these abuses, “The child forms a paracosm, a dream world, ruled over by an imaginary friend who is everything the child is not: omniscient, omnipotent, perfect, brilliant, and omnipresent. In short: a godhead or divinity. The child worships this newfound ally and therefore makes a human sacrifice to this Moloch: he offers his true self.”

Narcissism then becomes the celebration, elevation, and glorification of a superior absence, a howling emptiness, the all-devouring void of a black hole with a galaxy of internal objects swirling around it, Vaknin writes.

Many, and probably even most, grow out of this into normal adolescence and adulthood and willingly and effectively face the world. Most learn to develop an understanding of other people and cease to see themselves as the be-all and the end-all of existence. However, the problem now is that a growing number do not and have begun to wield influence and even power in our society.

Narcissism as a collective force, he maintains, is aggressive, intolerant and exploitative. It is a death cult. It elevates objects above people. In a society of spectacle, a society of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, everyone is rendered a commodity. Materialism and consumerism are manifestations of narcissism as is malignant, ostentatious individualism.

Vaknin is apocalyptic about the risks narcissism poses for our civilisation. Left unbridled and unconstrained and elevated ideologically, – which so many of its manifestations increasingly are in our culture and politics – it can bring about Armageddon in more than one way. The rise of narcissism is inexorable, he feels. For him It is comparable to climate change and to the shift in gender roles in terms of its potential to destroy the human race as we know it.

Are we really in as perilous a state as Vaknin envisages? There is no doubt that the critical institutions which maintain our civilisation – academe, media of communication, government  and even christian churches – are worryingly infiltrated by this pathological blindness. However, so many of these corrupting and anti-human ideologies in the past have carried within themselves the seeds of their own destruction, that there are surely grounds for hope that this one will also consume itself. The destructive forces unleashed by the French Revolution, wrecking as they did fundamental human institutions of church and state,  appalled Edmund Burke. Sadly he did not live to see that monster devouring itself or the ultimate taming of its remnants following over two decades of murderous war. Marxist communism ultimately imploded under the sheer weight of its own anti-human prescriptions. Narcissism, pathologically slippery as it is, will hopefully be eventually rendered harmless by human resilience and the antibody of common sense. Our race has a costly but good record in dealing with the multiple existential threats which it has had to deal with throughout our history.

(This article will appear in the April edition of Position Papers.)

The Spectacular Hills of Donegal – an Introduction

A superb introduction to one of the most spectacularly beautiful parts of Ireland in North West Donegal. It is a simple and very impressive presentation by a hill-walker from Dublin who just took a few days off work to do it. You won’t, I think, regret the 27 minutes it will take you to watch it.

Please share it.

Mephistopheles at Large?

Kit Harington, as Marlowe’s anti-hero Doctor Faustus 

Do we live in the best of times or do we live in the worst of times?

Ross Douthat of the New York Times seems to think we stand somewhere in between and has been mulling over the direction in which we might be heading.

His mulling is mainly in an American context but his spectrum encompasses the wider Western world as well. Ireland, as an offshore island for the driving forces of corporate America, is certainly not difficult to include in his exploratory analysis of the watershed our western civilisation now seems to straddle.

In some recent writing – in his weekly NYT column and his newsletter for subscribers – he admits to no more than “dabbling” in a peculiar kind of optimism about the American future, arguing that if we can avoid various forms of self-destruction over the next decade or two, we might find ourselves in a better position than almost any peer or rival — as an ageing world’s last bastion of dynamism and growth.

But he admits that dynamism and growth are a far cry from what ultimately matters or what can give any guarantee of even a semblance of human happiness.

Rod Dreher is an apostle preaching a more pessimistic vision of the direction in which he sees us currently hurtling. He is proposing a more radical and demanding solution to a decaying world than Douthat: cut yourself off from all that corrupts you in modernity – because it is irredeemable. Abandon it.

No matter how comfortable and cultured we might feel in this present dispensation, Dreher argues that if the human spirit is denied what it takes to fulfil the deepest longings of the soul: a sense of cosmic purpose beyond mere individualism, and common values beyond the whims and aspirations of the self, it will remain lost in a wilderness.

Douthat is a more optimistic apostle. He seems to suggest that we have a different kind of choice. His optimism rests on his reading of the history of mankind, right back to the Garden of Eden. In a certain way the choice before us is the same fatal choice which confronted Adam and Eve. Do we make a pact with Satan, as they attempted to do, or do we draw all the benefits we can from the second chance given to us and them by the Creator after their Fall?

Douthat reminds us how the serpent gave Eve and Adam some sort of forbidden knowledge, “yes – but it’s before that Fall, not afterward, that God tells humanity to fill the Earth and subdue it, and when Adam and Eve are cast out of Eden that mission carries on, just freighted with more suffering and pain.”

The great temptation confronting the modern world, Douthat suggests, is the temptation succumbed to by the legendary Doctor Faustus, who made a pact with Mephistopheles to gain the whole world and lost his soul in the process.

Douthat identifies a line of tension that runs through a lot of his own writing.

I’m a Catholic writer who often criticizes the decadence of the late modern world and urges it to rediscover dynamism and ambition. But if techno-capitalist ambitions are fundamentally Faustian, should a Catholic observer (or anyone else with similar commitments) really wish for them to rise again? In the Bible, after all, Promethean dreams are not always treated kindly. It’s the serpent who promises forbidden knowledge, the bloody-handed Cain who founds the first city (Genesis 4:17-18), the builders of Babel who are scattered to the winds. Maybe the Promethean spirit in America needs to be exorcised, not revived.

Douthat is looking for a way in which serious conservative or convinced religious believers can welcome a new American century not defined by the spirit of the famous doctor, whose impulse was to bargain for power with the very devil?

Douthat gently takes issue with some who would consider Christianity to be a religion exclusively concerned with bearing suffering in the present for the sake of the hereafter. In fact, he says, the dynamism of Christian cultures has usually reflected the working-through of the tensions between that conception of the faith and the equally powerful conception of Christianity as a religion of repair, reform, healing even revolution. He sees in the fabric of both the Old and New Testaments a weaving of this tension reflecting both a fallen world to be patiently endured and a fertile world that can be mastered and transformed.

The first murderer builds the first metropolis, yes, but the history of God’s people centers on Jerusalem, the holy city; the Bible culminates in a transformed and redeemed cosmopolis, not a return to a purely pastoral Eden. God lets Israel suffer invasions because of its unfaithfulness, he scatters his chosen people and sends them into exile – but in the rare moments when the Israelites have faithful leaders, faithful kings, they prosper in worldly as well as supernatural terms.

He reminds us that Jesus treats suffering, his own and that of others, as part of God’s unfolding plan, a cup to be drunk deeply no matter how strong the urge to let it pass. But then he also heals the sick and suffering everywhere he goes, rewards people seeking healing who take extraordinary steps to reach him, and sends his disciples out to heal more people.

Then there is the history of the Christian Church and its interface with the world of human culture and development.

Followers of Christ went into the desert and lived on pillars and built monasteries and accepted violent death in every form. But they also built and developed and invented, forging the medieval and early modern forms of civilization that carried us forward into the scientific and industrial revolutions that made our own global civilization possible.

He does take note of a certain doom-laden Catholic account of this dynamic modern history (which tracks with certain doom-laden left-wing accounts of modern industrial capitalism) in which the last few hundred years of technological breakthroughs and rising life expectancies and soaring skyscrapers are just one long Faustian bargain, carrying us toward the same self-destructive endpoint as the architects of Babel.

He doesn’t think this account really works: “There has been so much growth and vitality for Christianity within the long era of scientific and technological progress, so many surprising rebirths for different forms of Christian faith, and an underappreciated relationship between dynamism in the secular order and revival in the religious realm that if you’re any kind of providentialist you have to see a version of technological modernity as part of God’s unfolding plan.” He cites Kendrick Oliver’s  To Touch the Face of God, a study of  “The Sacred, the Profane, and the American Space Program, 1957–1975”, affirming his view.

He is not saying that there isn’t also a version that tends to corruption, dehumanization and ultimately our destruction. He agrees with Dreher and other pessimists that you can see that darkness visible along some of the tech frontiers that our society is currently exploring, and in those futurist worldviews that imagine humanity superseded or replaced.

But in American history he sees plenty of evidence of ambitious, developmentalist, exploration-oriented visions which seek humane forms of economic growth, the wise use of new technologies, a moral discernment about scientific achievements but not the rejection of their fruits: “However attenuated and fragmented, those impulses still exist – more so, I would say, in our country than in any rival power or alternative cultural redoubt – and I think they still offer the best chance to battle the chronic illness of decadence without bargaining our humanity away.”

In the context of all this we might leave the last word to Romano Guardini, writing more than eighty years ago – in a book published in German just before the cataclysm of World War II. He was much preoccupied with the modern world and the advance of technology, both with the good in it and with those aspects which seemed to threaten our very humanity. He wrote:

One day the Antichrist will come: a human being who introduces an order of things in which rebellion against God will attain its ultimate power. He will be filled with enlightenment and strength. The ultimate aim of all aims will be to prove that existence without Christ is possible – no, that Christ is the enemy of existence, which can be fully realized only when all Christian values have been destroyed. His arguments will be so impressive, supported by means of such tremendous power – violent and diplomatic, material and intellectual – that to reject them will result in almost insurmountable scandal, and everyone whose eyes are not opened by grace will be lost.

When he wrote those words that Antichrist had already arrived on his continent in two incarnations, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Both were defeated but their progenitor, Mephistopheles, is still as present as ever. Guardini assures us, in the depths of his Christian faith, that no matter how often he returns he will never prevail over those living in the grace of God, those to whom it will be clear what the Christian essence really is: that which stems not from the world, but from the heart of God; victory of grace over the world; redemption of the world, for her true essence is not to be found in herself, but in God, from whom she has received it. When God becomes all in all, the world will burst into flower.

The way of resistance to and correction of evil – implicitly Douthat’s way – seems to offer us a better future than the way of abandonment and flight from the world suggested by the pessimistic option. All time, in Guardini’s reading of our life in the world, is not of the world but “from the heart of God”. Therefore, we live in the best of times.

First published in the March edition of Position Papers Review

The Journey of T. S. Eliot

Part Two

In the heart of Périgueux’s historic district, stands Saint-Front Cathedral

In August 1919 Eliot was still battling with the ideas and the form that would become The Waste Land. In that month he went, with Ezra Pound, on a walking tour of Provence. At one point they separated, Pound leaving to meet his wife. At this stage Eliot made what Matthew Hollis describes in his 2022 book on The Waste Land as a “his defining visit to Périgueux cathedral”. Hollis continues by saying that no account of what happened there is available but that “what is known is that what took place at the cathedral would be a turning point in Eliot’s life”.

The cathedral was dedicated to the legendary St Front, sent by St Peter to preach in the lands of Aquitaine. It was its later history which moved Eliot in some way, perhaps through the example of the powerful convictions of the protagonists of a later story. Provence and Aquitaine became battlegrounds in which Christianity had to confront two separate heresies in different ages, Arianism in one age and Albigensianism in another. 

Bishop Paternus had been deposed as the Bishop of Périgueux in 361 AD for preaching Arianism, the heresy which held that Jesus was not truly the Son of God, and unequal to Him. Paternus, was fiercely punished by St Hilary of Poitiers, known as the “Hammer of Arians”. Hilary proclaimed that to deny the Trinity was not only folly, but  a heresy. In substance Hilary said: To undertake such a thing is to embark upon the boundless, to dare the incomprehensible; to attempt to speak of God with more refinement than He has provided us with; it is enough that He has given His nature through the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. “Whatever is sought over and above this is beyond the meaning of words, beyond the limits of perception, beyond the embrace of understanding.”

Hilary was writing in the fourth century but his  language would resonate in Eliot in the twentieth. Eliot now found himself rudderless. It would be more than twenty years until his belief in the Blessed Trinity would flower definitively in Four Quartets. But in the early 1920s he still had many miles to travel. Nevertheless, these early Christian struggles shattered what was left of Eliot’s Unitarian foundations. 

Hollis writes:

In Périgueux, that summer, Eliot was a son separated from the love of a father in death and in life, and had yet to find the guidance of a holy spirit with which his joining of the Church of England in 1927 would allow him to commune. In the chronicles of the building before him, and in his walking conversations with Pound, Eliot could trace the accounts of martyrs and heretics alike who had gone into exile – or gone into the fire – for their convictions or their sins, people who had found a measure to live by and even to die for, who had found a family of higher calling. What had Eliot to offer compared to such commitment? Not the “one great tragedy” of the war in which he was denied a part. Not the daily negotiations at the bank for a treaty that he considered immoral and unjust, and altogether “a bad peace”. Not the wedding vows, taken before God, that seemed to him to have turned to ashes in his hands. He found he had no ideological framework from which to respond. The Unitarianism of his childhood seemed to him a poor man’s fuddle: a culture of humanitarianism, of ethical mind games rather than a passionate adherence to Incarnation, Heaven and Hell… And in the absence of a religious conviction, his writing simply could not bear the weight: regarded merely for its satire and wit, it had yet to find the ground from which to respond to the intensity of the emotions he was experiencing.

Eliot now felt alone. Pound was a kind of Confucian and this meant nothing to Eliot. “There are moments,” wrote Eliot in 1935, “perhaps not known to everyone, when a man may be nearly crushed by the terrible awareness of his isolation from every other human being.” But this religious anxiety filling him at times with a sense of dispossession, of emptiness, turned out in fact to be cathartic, his dark night of the soul.

Hollis interprets it this way: “a dispossession was also an exorcism: a word to describe the purging of demons, as applied by the Catholic Church from as early as its second century: it is a removal of the bad by the good. But that wasn’t exactly what Eliot had said. A dispossession not of the dead but by the dead:  not an action undertaken by him, but one done to him.”

He was now experiencing intimations of Purgatory, something alien to the theology of Unitarianism but surely something which might have remained in his subconscious from Annie Dunn’s prayers for the souls she believed to be in that place for a time. Hollis comments:

What transfixed Eliot in this moment was not heaven and hell, but purgatory, the temporary suffering or expiation for the purpose of spiritual cleansing. “In purgatory the torment of flame is deliberately and consciously accepted by the penitent,” Eliot wrote in his 1929 Dante. He made his own translation of the moment in the Purgatorio in which Dante is approached by souls from the  flames: “Then certain of them made towards me, so far as they could, but ever watchful not to come so far that they should not be in the fire. The souls in purgatory suffer “because they wish to suffer, for purgation”, he wrote, because they wish to be in the fire, because “in their suffering is hope”. 

Dante and Virgil encountering souls in Purgatory

In such a moment of isolation, Hollis notes, Eliot would write in years to come, he felt only pity for the man who found himself alone, as he had, “alone with himself and his meanness and futility, alone without God”. Even later he wrote that to be without the company of God is to be abandoned to the wilderness, to an endless seesaw between anarchy and tyranny: “a seesaw which in the secular world, I believe, has no end”. 

Eliot’s The Waste Land  was, in a way, a journey through Purgatory. Indeed its power to this day may ultimately rest on its character as a grim but hopeful reminder of this supernatural reality believed in by Christians and Jewish people. The Scriptural basis for the Christian belief in Purgatory is the instruction of Judas Maccabeus to his soldiers to pray for the souls of their dead companions.

The three last words of The Waste Land, one word repeated three times in fact, are Shantih shantih shantih. Eliot’s note on this tells us that repeated as here, they are a formal ending to an Upanishad. He adds a translation, “The peace which passeth understanding”, but says that this is “a feeble translation of the content of this word.”

Eliot’s great poem was soon recognised as a masterpiece of the modern world. Eliot took a few more years to reach his shantih in the Christian faith. He did reach it and from that vantage gave English literature more than one magnificent literary work which reflected the spirit of his now Christian soul.

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The Journey of Thomas Stearns Eliot

Part One

A cold coming he had of it. First there was the sterile unitarian background of his family in St. Louis. Then there was the rejection by his first love, Emily Hale – even though they became life-long epistolary confidants. Next there was the half-exile in England and the family rancour which his tragic marriage to Vivienne Haig-Wood provoked. Add to all that, living through the terrible war which he had to watch from the sidelines, combined with its aftermath when all the hopes of humanity were painfully drained from European civilisation for decades.

All this fed into his tortured soul and helped produce his most famous – if not his greatest – masterpiece, The Waste Land, in 1922. Within that complicated and mysterious work, however, are early glimpses of a soul emerging from the grim panorama of an apparently decaying and hopeless world. In it intimations can already be felt of the journey he had already unconsciously embarked upon:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you?

Of course no reader of Eliot’s poetry – or, he would hold, any genuine poetry – should dare to say what he meant by any given assembly of lines. But that does not mean that they did not mean something.

There is an account of a reading in Oxford in 1929 of the very difficult poem, Ash Wednesday, a kind of confession of faith at the time of his conversion, in which a polite student asked him ‘Please, sir, what do you mean by the line: “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree” . Eliot looked at him – I hope kindly – and said: ‘I mean, “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree.” In 1948 Eliot said of poetry,“A poem does not say something, it is something”.

Matthew Hollis in his magnificent book on The Waste Land, published in 2022, quotes Eliot as saying “…that in the construction of the poem (and here he paused to spell out precisely what he meant by construction: what he called ‘the mental operation of writing it’) there had been no appearance of an ‘intellectual generalisation’, only mood, variation and associative memory. That may have been keeping his powder dry, but in doing so he rehearsed an increasingly familiar position that no reader should look to an author for meaning, whether or not it stands for a civilisation in decline. ‘It may certainly be what the poem “means”,’ he commented, ‘so long as that is not identified with what the author is supposed to have consciously meant when he wrote it.’  Meaning, in other words, lies at the discretion of the reader”.

Using that discretion is one of the great joys of reading great poetry. It is also one of the keys to revealing the truth which unfolds in our ears, before our eyes and in our hearts through the images, intimations and moods which make up the totality of a poetic work.

But what we glean about Eliot’s journey – and of course we are talking of his journey to the Christian faith – is to be found in more than his verse. Hard facts are not wanting.

We know, for example, that Eliot, in his examination of the legacies of our past, had given much thought to the role of tradition in the religions of the world. Robert Crawford, in the first volume of his biography of the poet, Young Eliot, which takes us up to the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, noted:

He had been thinking more widely, too, about tradition and theology. To innovate, he argued, required consciousness of tradition, even if only to avoid repeating what had been accomplished already. Yet ‘Tradition’ with a capital ‘T’ could be a mere repository of unexamined practices. Strikingly, when reflecting on contemporary poetry in late 1917, he had suggested that ‘for an authoritative condemnation of theories attaching extreme importance to tradition as a criterion of truth, readers should consult a nineteenth-century papal encyclical… Tom’s commitment to avant-garde work by Joyce and Wyndham Lewis accompanied his reading of Catholic theologically-minded philosophers including Father John Rickaby, Cardinal Joseph Mercier (whose Manual of Modem Scholastic Philosophy was published in English in 1917) and Father Peter Coffey on interpretation of the tradition of ‘modern Catholic thought’. Tom belonged to no church. Yet, visiting Anglo-Catholic City churches in his lunch hours, he was conscious of Catholicism as ‘the only Church which can even pretend to maintain a philosophy of its own, a philosophy, as we are increasingly aware, which is succeeding in establishing a claim to be taken quite seriously’.

Thomas Stearns was the seventh and last child of Charlotte and Henry (Hal) Eliot. She was forty- three when he was born. Matthew Hollis recounts how his upbringing was entrusted to Annie Dunn, a nursemaid of Irish parents from Co. Cork, who heated the bath water for Eliot each morning, and whose affectionate presence in the house warmed the space in the young boy’s life that his mother left vacant. It was Annie, said Eliot later, who was his earliest influence, and the household figure to whom he was greatly attached. She took him to school, and sometimes to pray in the small Catholic Church of Immaculate Conception which she attended. There he would delight in the colourful statues, the bright paper flowers and glowing lights. It was with Annie that he had his first conversations about the presence of God. To a young boy of six and seven, her religion was the vivid entertainment that his family’s Unitarianism was not. ‘I was devoted to her,’ he recalled.

Who can measure influence, especially at so young an age? But all truth is not measurable to us and it would be foolish to rule out the influence of Annie on the intimations of mortality – and immortality – revealed later by Eliot. When he showed Gerontion, his pre-Waste Land poem about old age and death to his sceptical friend Ezra Pound, he is also reported to have revealed something of his ongoing wrestling with religion: ‘I am afraid of the life after death,’ he told his friend. A religious anxiety worried him, filling him at times with a sense of dispossession, of emptiness.

Eliot, without apology, ‘borrowed’ from others and from tradition for his own art.

About Gerontion he wrote to Pound: “But I can show you in the thing I enclose how I have borrowed  from half a dozen sources.” Among the borrowings to which he referred was The Dream of Gerontius, a poem by John Henry Newman written in 1865 after his conversion to Roman Catholicism. The poem was set to music in 1900 in a magnificent choral work by Edward Elgar. Newman’s poem follows a life through to death into reawakening before God.

Eliot’s pre Waste Land years were full of influences which laid the foundations not only for his great poem but also for that moment when he discovered that he was “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods”. But to reach that point his journey had to take him through The Waste Land.

(Posted on Position Papers, January 2024 in In Passing)

Part Two next Friday