'An eternal patience'

The overwhelming favourite in my straw poll for a thesis title was this enigmatic phrase: 'an eternal patience'. It comes from perhaps the toughest speech in Eliot's play:



They know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer.

They know and do not know, that action is suffering

And suffering action. Neither does the agent suffer

Nor the patient act. But both are fixed

In an eternal action, an eternal patience

To which all must consent that it may be willed

And which all must suffer that they may will it,

That the pattern may subsist, for the pattern is the action

And the suffering, that the wheel may turn and still

Be forever still.



This is Eliot starting to sound a lot like the Eliot of the Four Quartets: abstract, difficult, and yet somehow quite beautiful too. Agents and patients (in the sense of those who suffer): they cannot actually remove themselves, though they imagine that they might, from the pattern of providence. The line between action and suffering is not humanly drawn. Rather both are 'fixed' - in the eternal action/patience. God himself - suggested by the 'eternal' - both acts, and in acting, suffers. He described in the Bible as 'not slow to act' but patient - both in the sense that he waits, but also that he endures, 'suffers' what comes to pass, without thereby losing his mastery of the events that swirl around him.



Two of my main themes, temptation and providence, meld sweetly in this phrase 'an eternal patience'. The martyr's model is Jesus' 'eternal patience'...