1.1 The Unfinished Quest
In his light-spirited letter of 13 September 1927, Eliot tells Conrad Aiken that he composed Journey of the Magi in less than an hour, his mood sustained with a good dose of gin taken before his Sunday lunch (L3 700). The remark is nonchalant. It has the tenor of modesty bordering on self-deprecation, adroitly modified by an admixture of the poet's pride (the suggestion that the poem might have been better had he spent more time on it). But the way Eliot felt about the poem's theme was far from flippant. On the contrary, he might have wished to downplay the gravity of his verse, for the weight of doubt in the poem is crushing, which he admits in a letter written in the spring of the following year, to Paul Gilson, suggesting that the Magus’ uncertainty is so heavy that the old man wants it to be resolved by his own death (L4 85). The doubt, however, was the poet's. David Ward reads the poem as a “re-enactment” of Eliot's religious conversion (240), which took place on 29 June 1927 and which, as noted by Edmund Wilson, was marked by insecurity and anguish (159), the feelings compounded by Eliot's distress at the Vatican's condemnation of the ultranationalist Action Française in the preceding year.1
If Eliot's journey of faith had been formally concluded a month before the publishing of the Ariel, in intellectual terms, its aim seemed far from certain. His conversion was not a Damascus-like epiphany, but rather the final stage in the process of a philosophical exploration which had begun with his interest in F. H. Bradley and T. E. Hulme.2 That Eliot's conversion was a protracted process was noted as early as 1930, by Morton D. Zabel, who, keenly disappointed, declared: “What had long been implicit in his work was at length fully disclosed: Eliot had never succeeded in cutting the roots of native puritanism which bound him to the soil of Christianity” (331). If rightly noting the length of the path, Zabel seems to have put too much emphasis on the sense of continuity. In fact, in 1931, Eliot remembered the Unitarian faith of his ancestors in a passage tinged with irony: he recalled Unitarianism as the religion in which “things were either black or white” (P4 316),3 a site of a clear antinomy that he renounced when he was ready to embrace the doubt which, he sensed, was inalienable from belief. While accepting the insufficiency of reason, Eliot could not ignore the claims of rationality. Four years after having written Journey of the Magi, in his introduction to Pascal's Pensées, he admitted that he felt a kinship with Cardinal Newman, striving to provide a logical explanation of his conversion (P4 342), and Blaise Pascal, struggling with his own scepticism, or confronting “the demon of doubt” (P4 345).4 To Eliot, they were exemplary in how they handled the dilemma of a believer: the conviction that the intellect is not enough and, yet, that it must be used to comprehend and communicate faith.5 In Journey of the Magi, Eliot shares his difficulty of comprehending the facts fundamental to his faith with a biblical wise man, allowing his and the Magus’ voices to merge. After many years—when he was close to writing his last Ariel—he explained the overlapping of the voices in his poems as a result of the poet having donned a costume and assumed his place before an audience (The Three Voices 14–15). However, in Journey of the Magi, rather than voicing his thoughts in front of his audience—as a stoic would—Eliot engages his listeners directly, speaking to them and involving them in his quest for understanding.
It is a kind of quest that lacks finality. From the perspective of contemporary theology, its characteristic inconclusiveness is stressed by Thomas Torrance, who (faced with the task of reconciling theology and philosophical science) points out that we cannot even ask sceptical questions about the nature of God and reality because the questions we ask have always been formulated from a position within. The adoption of an external point of view is impossible. Echoing Karl Barth, Torrance states that there are, at most, two things one can do: either remain “entirely silent” or “ask questions only within the circle of the knowing relationship in order to test the nature and possibility of the rational structure within it” (54–55; emphasis added). Hence, the believer's business is not to provide the ultimate justification for her faith, but rather test whether and how her belief can be matched by particular frameworks of ideas.
1.2 The Structure of Belief
The Eliotean Magus has no such conceptual framework; he only has questions which are left unanswered. The event for which he travelled is inconceivable if regarded from the perspective of the thought patterns of the ancient pagan world which, as explained by Hans Georg Gadamer, knew the paradigm of embodiment, but not that of incarnation (418). In the ancient world, the body and soul were distinct entities, their separateness evident in the philosophies arising from the Platonic and Pythagorean traditions, specifically, in the theory of metempsychosis. The ancient gods could assume a human shape as well as the forms of plants and animals; but, while variously embodied, they retained their divine essence unaltered. This gap between the physical and the spiritual disappeared with the inception of the Christian world, in which God did not merely take on a human form, but became human. This, Gadamer asserts, constituted a specifically Christian rendering of the connection between the human and the divine: the idea of incarnation superseded the ancient pattern of embodiment. In the Christian interpretation, God became a man only once—as the Son with an ordinary yet holy body, the emphasis being put on His inimitable corporeality and historical uniqueness.6 For the Magus, the incompatibility of the ancient framework and the Christian doctrine is of consequence. Limited to the ancient patterns of thought, he can only sense the impact which his journey made on him; but he cannot conceptually grasp it. The journey leaves him reminiscing, unsure of how to term what he witnessed (he speaks of “a Birth” [JM 36], some birth), isolated and cringed at a feeling that his life had been emptied of its substance. He welcomes death to end his distress of not knowing what has passed and of not belonging anywhere any more.
To understand the Magus’ distress about the reality, or illusiveness, of what he had witnessed, it is illuminating to return to the essay which T. S. Eliot wrote in his student days in 1913—on the “Degrees of Reality.”7 In the paper, the young Eliot proposes to speak of gradations rather than of divisions; thus, rather than considering the division into the real and the illusive, he discusses the movement towards, or away from, the real. He replaces the dichotomies of the subjective and the objective, and the real and the illusory, with the idea of increasing individual understanding, or, with the progressively individualised approach to an experience which, initially, had been non-individualised, shared. To explain his theory, Eliot resorts to an image of a human pyramid: “a pyramid of opinions” (P1 62), with several “gymnasts”—each one representing a separate judgement—standing in rising tiers on each other's shoulders. The closer to practical assertions, or the more immediate thus represented judgements are, the more widely they are shared. Or, as depicted with the allegorical pyramid, the closer the gymnasts (the judgements) are to the ground, the longer the horizontal line of these acrobats appears. On the other hand, the more individualised a perception of the shared experience becomes—the more decisively it is turned into a personal view—the smaller the number of the people who espouse it. In Eliot's visual allegory the higher the pyramid rises from its basis to its superstructure, the fewer gymnasts stand in its shortening tiers. In “our first judgments,” he says, a host of people can acquiesce; but “our superstructure” will only be shared by a tiny group (P1 62).
To build such a “superstructure” means to develop one's own subjective attitude and, then, to rationally substantiate this stance. It also means risking loneliness, such as that which was inflicted on Eliot when the modernist coteries reacted to his conversion with a shock, with Virginia Woolf famously finding it deplorable (458).8 Critics and editors, likewise, did not easily accommodate his turn to religion. Zabel expressed his disappointment with Eliot's poetry having taken a religious turn (331), while Louis Untermeyer sympathised with the younger generation who “scorned Eliot's withdrawal into Anglo-Catholicism” (116). When Journey of the Magi was published, it elicited such conflicting responses9 that Eliot, writing to Lady Rothermere, on 30 August 1927, resolved to be his own judge (L3 670), ready to pay the price of intellectual isolation for what his contemporaries construed as a “betrayal” (Woelfel 129) of his high modernist profile. “Degrees of Reality” includes a prediction of such ostracism. Yet, while anticipating alienation, Eliot insists on the significance of one's unique attitude to an experience, reasserting, at several points (see P1 58, 61, 63), the necessity of the increasing individualisation of an opinion. He describes this progress as the movement “from the less real to the more real” (P1 58). But he also renders this increasing sense of reality through a paradox: “For the process toward greater reality is at the same time a process away from reality” (P1 62). This is because, by forming and pursuing one's own judgement—or, by moving upwards on the “pyramid of opinion”—one also distances oneself from the reality understood as “compromise-reality” (P1 63), from those aspects of reality which are considered as non-disputable and shared.
This is the way in which the journey has affected the Magus, now isolated and full of doubt as to the meaning of what he saw. Reminiscing, he attempts to view the shared and indisputable facts of his pilgrimage as embedded within a new superstructure of understanding; and he fails, because, historically, such a superstructure has yet to be built. However, he also succeeds in his striving, for he manages to re-assert the significance of the base line of the Eliotean pyramid—that which consists of the non-disputable ground facts.
