T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word: Intersections of Literature and Christianity

Intersections of Literature and Christianity

G. Atkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781349482504
  9781137389657
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137381637
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Literature

With special attention to the poems For Lancelot Andrewes, Journey of the Magi, and Ash-Wednesday , G. Douglas Atkins offers an exciting new analysis of T.S. Eliot's debt to the seventeenth-century churchman Lancelot Andrewes and his theories of reading and writing texts.

1

On Reading and Incarnation

Abstract: In his 1928 essay on Lancelot Andrewes, Eliot focuses on the Bishop’s sermons and his intensely verbal and comparative way of both reading and writing, “squeezing and squeezing words until they yield a full juice of meaning.” In his own literary commentary, Eliot employs what he calls the “tools of criticism”: “comparison and analysis.” Comparison especially needs to be related to the central Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, which involves two—God and man—in “impossible union.” Reading in parallel structural fashion always involves (at least) two, consisting of the “intersection” of reader and text.

Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word: Intersections of Literature and Christianity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137381637.

. . . [A]ll literary works . . . depend for their life on a relationship between author and audience. What the reader may see does not exist in the work unless it can be imputed to the author (known or unknown) in his capacity as artist. Conversely, what the author may intend has no literary reality unless it can be discovered in his work by a proper reader. Each man exists in art only as an object for the other’s contemplation, defined by those aspects of himself which can be interested or embodied in the public, literary terms of the work as read or heard.

—Irvin Ehrenpreis, Dr. Swift, Vol. II of Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age

Reading is an act always involving two: in fact, two who meet. In this book, it consists of a chain of intersections made up of the Bible, Lancelot Andrewes, T.S. Eliot, and me. I make no pretense to be one with Eliot, as he would not have with Bishop Andrewes, nor the great sermon-writer and translator of the King James Bible with that text, although I would say that I hope to be attuned to both (as well as with the Bible). At the same time, I would like to think that, as I (try to) get them right, I have not been swallowed up in and by either of them. I mean nothing mystical, no three-in-one, for example. The text remains, in this case Eliot’s, but so do I as his reader. We do come together, however, or so I will insist. If there is a meeting, there had been a separation, and in the case of reading, that separation of text and reader is theoretical and physical alike. “We” come together in an act that participates in the Christian pattern of Incarnation.

As Lancelot Andrewes says in a Nativity sermon, “Christianity is a meeting,”

and to this meeting there go pia dogmata as well as bona opera— Righteousness as well as Truth. Err not this Error then, to single any out as it were in disgrace of the rest; say not, one will serve the turn, what should we do with the rest. . . . Each of these is a [part] of Christianity, you shall never while you live make it serve for the whole.¹

Andrewes is here, to be sure, treating the four divine attributes (the other two being Mercy and Peace), but that matters not for our point at the moment, which concerns the meeting of the previously separated, assumed or real.

It is precisely this never-unitary, single, or monistic character of Christianity that defines it and distinguishes it from all other religions. Any meeting of opposites—binaries, they are often called—is an analogy of the central Christian doctrine. As a form of such meeting, reading participates, willy-nilly, in the reality that the pattern called Incarnation describes and instantiates. We are not speaking here of intention or necessarily conscious attention, but rather of a fundamental and governing pattern universal and timeless, completely independent of the observer or individual.

In reading, give-and-take is involved. Citing a passage in the Romantic poet William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude, the contemporary critic Geoffrey Hartman has pointed to a reciprocity in the act of demand-and-response: in the poet’s represented experience of owls’ hooting and a hearer’s calling back in reply, Hartman discovers an “allegory of reading.”² The Christian understanding is similar but subtler and richer. As the Orthodox theologian Nicholas Lossky has put it, “by starting from a word,” which is more concrete than Hartman’s example, Bishop Andrewes “brings out all the reality of the Incarnation.”³

Such appears in the following discussion of the meeting that is fundamentally reciprocal—the topic of the Nativity sermon is the dual nature of the unfathomable mystery that is God’s becoming fully man while remaining fully divine:

This we are to hold; to conceive is more than to receive. It is so to receive as we yield somewhat of our own also. A vessel is not said to conceive the liquor that is put into it. Why? because it yieldeth nothing from itself. The blessed Virgin is, and therefore is because she did. She did both give and take. Give of her own substance whereof His body was framed; and take or receive power from the Holy Ghost, whereby was supplied the efficacy of the masculine seed. This is concipiet.⁴

By “concipiet,” Andrewes clarifies the dual nature of the God-man, distinguishing it from both “decipiet” and “recipient.” As Fr. Lossky writes, in the best study ever undertaken of Lancelot Andrewes, humanity was not, in Christ’s conception, “passively receptive; humanity participates actively, in the person of the Virgin, by making a gift of the flesh to Christ.” As to reading, to borrow again from Fr. Lossky, we discern “a structure penetrated by a theological significance.”⁵

To say, as I have done, that reading is an intersection belies in its simplicity the complexity engaged. To adduce, again as I have done, the obviously congruent notion of “meeting” helps but little. Let me try putting the matter this way:

Take again the Christian Trinity:

God

The Son, Jesus Christ

The Holy Ghost

Place beside It the character of reading as I have represented it here:

Text

Reader

Reading

Immediately, problems will be observed if, especially, we linger with the issues of giving and receiving, and more particularly still, that above-broached matter of conceiving. Omitted from my schematization of the Trinity is the Virgin, Who receives the Word of God and conceives as a result. The reception of texts may, then, require a parallel adjustment:

Text

Reader-Reading

Effects

The text “impregnates” the reader, resulting in a reading, which is by itself not the end of the activity being described. What happens thereafter and as a (further, parallel) result completes the act.

From Eliot, influenced by Andrewes, I derive procedures for reading, given that reading is an intersection or meeting of text and reader, in which the latter is “impregnated” by the former and produces in turn a reading (that leads outside the particular text to some action).

It probably cannot be over-emphasized that Verbum is the second Person of the Trinity. Thus writes Andrewes:

And to put all out of question that here is nihil personatum, but even persona, He that here is said to be “God manifested in the flesh,” is in another place said to be Verbum caro factum, “the Word made flesh.” So manifested that made; so taking our nature, as His and it are grown into one person, never to be severed or taken in sunder any more. And in sign thereof that flesh wherein He is manifested is the beginning of the verse [John 1:14], in the end of the verse in the very same flesh He is “received up into glory,” and in the same shall appear again at His second manifestation.⁶

Andrewes reveals not simply the relationship that exists between words, but also that that exists “between the words of a phrase.” And he shows “a structure penetrated by a theological significance,” as in the fifth Nativity sermon:

When St Matthew had begun his Gospel thus, “The Book of the generation of Jesus Christ to Son of David,” one nature, His humanity; St Mark was careful to begin his thus, “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God,”—the other nature, His divinity. But St John he joins them, Verbum caro factum est, “the Word became flesh.” Verbum, “the Word,” there is Dominus; and caro, the flesh,’ that is Natus.⁷

The Word, words, Jesus, and the Incarnation thus meld indissolubly.

Apparent here is Andrewes’s way of performing what can only be described as literary criticism, even if be limited: close verbal and linguistic analyses, themselves often the product, and sometimes the impetus, for close comparisons. In The Sacred Wood Eliot defines the “tools” of crit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 On Reading and Incarnation
• 2 Eliot Reading Lancelot Andrewes
• 3 Homage to Lancelot Andrewes
• 4 The Voice of (An)other: Lancelot Andrewes within and for Eliot’s Poems
• 5 “Sovegna vos” in Eliot’s Marian Poems: Falsehood, Separation, and Ash-Wednesday
• 6 “Orare et laborare”: Suffer Not Separation or Other Falsehoods
• Bibliography
• Index