Some photos from Canterbury Cathedral to do with the martyrdom of Thomas

Dame Helen Gardner

Helen Gardner was of the old school of literary critic - you know, the sort that wasn't obsessed by theory or by discerning what ideological interests were at play in the text.

But she wasn't afraid of sticking it to such eminent figures as T.S. Eliot (much beloved of this blog). In her The Art of TS Eliot she really gives Murder in the Cathedral quite a panning. She's right of course: as a play it makes a good church service. Essentially, nothing happens in the play (always a downer for an evening out at the theatre). The 'action' is concealed from the audience because it is spiritually realised. And Thomas isn't even very likeable. Gardner uses the expression 'classic prig'. As she puts it:

The problem is whether drama can deal with sin, and still be drama, or whether like the law, it can only deal with crime.

She goes on:

The central theme of the play is martyrdom, and martyrdom in its strict, ancient sense. For the word martyr means witness, and the Church did not at first confine the word to those who sealed their witness with their blood; it was a later distinction that separarted the martyrs from the confessors. We are not to think of a martyr as primarily one who suffers for a cause, or who gives up his life for truth, but as a witness to the awful reality of the supernatural.

Quite. The best bit of the play, she thinks, is the Chorus:

...the play transcends its origin and occasion, and the chorus becomes humanity, confronted by the mystery of iniquity and the mystery of holiness.

A comment on Murder in the Cathedral

Interestingly, Murder in the Cathedral provoked quite a debate in post-War Germany. This was one response:

'Eliot’s starkly medieval, anti-psychological rendition of Becket’s passion treats his martyrdom as an event in human time, when God’s divine order makes itself known to human beings. A Christian martyrdom reveals the structure of the divine order, calling those who witness it to assume their designated place in that order, which is marked by humble recognition of one’s sinfulness and dependence on God’s grace.'

'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'...

Eliot the conservative, and religion

Scrutonian conservatism is not dissimilar to TS Eliot's conservatism. Eliot, in his 'The Idea of a Christian Society' described the necessity for society to have religious institutions for its benefit and even for its survival. Christianity, in the form of an established church, meshes well with the traditions of Englishness. It implies a life in conformity with nature, he says - not in a pagan sense, but in that it aids and abets family and social and national life as they spring, as it were, from the soil. He is not silly enough to suggest that this means that every is a Christian if they are English: but rather, that a Christian society might provide fertile ground for the discovery of Christ by the individuals within it. So he says: 'We need to recover the sense of religious fear, so that it may be overcome by religious hope'.

Strangely, in Murder in the Cathedral it seems that Eliot is also aware of what a great temptation this is for the church! Society may want what the churches have to offer: but the churches may not be able to give it in the way that society wants...

The values debate in Australia replicates this tension. Society clearly wants a version of Christian values of the kind that liberalism is unable to provide. And it will pay for it. We just may be tempted to accept the offer...

Christian drama vs Greek drama

I would wish to argue that Murder in the Cathedral is powerful as a drama, certainly, at that immediate and surface level of the audience’s first encounter with it; but that this unusual and striking power is dependent on the Christian component of the play in a way in which the Greek tragedy is not in the same way dependent upon its religious world-view. (Or, it could be that the Greek experience of living in a world governed by a hidden fortuna is very similar to living in the contemporary secular world. The feeling of having to manage luck, as we have seen in our discussion of Nussbaum’s reading of Greek tragedy, is only to near to the post-Christian person. )

This is because the Christian gospel is itself of the form of a dramatic action. Christianity is not at all disconnected from the action of the play, inhabiting only the fringes of the script in abstruse religious forms; rather it everywhere and necessarily gives its actual form to the action of the play. The death of Thomas is so obviously and so insistently an imitation of the death of Christ; the form of the action of the play resembles in outline the temptation, passion and death of Jesus, without which it cannot bear its full meaning.

We could go further in taking up Emrys Jones’s point about the historical aspect of the play: the connection with historical events through imaginative and symbolic reconstruction is quite distinctively a Christian development. Granted, Greek drama and literature on occasion took its subjects from history, or from pre-history: but it turned them into types and showed no real interest in the correspondence of the action to the action in history. In the Christian imagination, historical events are traceable in direct line back from the present: and though clearly ‘fictional’ elements are added to the reconstruction of the event in order to make the dramatisation appealing within the conventions of literary forms, we see reminders to the audience everywhere that there are real historical events to which the action is intended to correspond, and of which the audience is meant to have a vicarious experience. Could it ever be said of a Greek drama, as Jones says of Murder in the Cathedral, that it ‘takes its strength from its fidelity to history’? As we have seen, and as Eliot demonstrates in his play, a Christian view of the world rests on an understanding of providentia dei, not fortuna; and so history necessarily takes on a different significance as a meaningfully continuous series of events.

Emrys Jones reviews a production of Murder in the Cathedral

Canterbury Cathedral: not quite as irrelevant as the last one.

Emrys Jones wrote an intriguing review essay of a production of Murder in the Cathedral at Stratford, published in 1993. In the essay he argues that (as Craig Raine explains) Eliot's play is highly dramatic - and that the drama, though helped by historical authenticity of the events staged and significantly enriched by directorial additions, is clearer because its religious appeal is now more or less defunct. Jones says 'it's a play not a theological or devotional discourse!'

I find this (naturally) a remarkable judgement, and the latter comment a false dichotomy. Removing the 'religious' component of the death of the Archbishop leaves you with what kind of death exactly? In what way is the death at all honourable or noble or admirable or representative if it is a secular martyrdom of some kind? In fact, Eliot makes sure that we cannot make precisely this move. There is no 'cause' for which he dies - he is no MLK or Gandhi, no secularised saint. In fact, Thomas resists at every turn secularising himself: that is surely the point! He does not even succomb to pride - unless you side with his murderers, who justify themselves (as he does not) by accusing him of delusions of spiritual grandeur. If the religious component is excised like that, is he not guilty of neglect of his duty, his people and his country? Is he not convicted of seditious action, or wilfully provoking the wrath of the king in order to secure his place in history? What comfort or lesson can modern audiences take from this?

Raine perceptibly ask whether the play can still work if there is this defunct core at the centre of it. Quite...

I think this is illustrative of the contemporary inability to come to terms with the martyr as anything but a pitiable and possibly dangerous figure. If the convictions that move Thomas do not convict the audience at some level, then I find it hard to know how the drama can have any purchase other than as a historical curio. That these events are historical is perhaps more significant than it at first seems: because these events are not invented as a morality tale of rather sentimental proportions, because these are representations of real people engaged in what was a well testified event locatable and date-able, then we are not afforded the luxury of dismissing them as somehow fantastical and inhuman. This is likewise true of the martyrs of the church: there they stand, as real people prepared to be unwavering in their conviction of the truth, such that we cannot deny them. Their flesh was burnt, and torn by wild animals, and pierced.

Jones also writes:

Robert Speaght has spoken as an actor of the difficulty he found at first in coming to temrs with the passivity of the protagonist.

This is something I have also noticed about the play and about Thomas, and it is quite deliberate on Eliot's part that it be so. Thomas is NOT a man of action; he is a man of passion.

Raine, Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

Raine comments on Murder in the Cathedral:

Eliot's coinage, 'Unreal city', [in The Waste Land] owes a great deal to Buddhist ideas of maya or illusion. Later it is assimilated to the Christian idea of this fleeting world. In Murder in the Cathedral, the chorus refers to Hebrews 13:14: 'for here we have no continuining city, but we seek one to come.' Or, in Eliot's play: 'Here is no continuing city, here is no abiding stay'. Religions have a way of slighting the temporal. p. 82

Is this what really happens in the play, and in Christian thought too? Is the temporal 'slighted'? The pressing urgency of the present is certainly reduced by Christian eschatology. But, on the other hand, you could easily argue that the temporal is given renewed significance: as Paul says, in light of the resurrection 'your labour in the Lord is not in vain'.

Craig Raine, TS Eliot and Renunciation

Craig Raine of New College, Oxford, argues in his new book TS Eliot - Image, Text and Context that one of the central themes of Eliot's poetry is what might be termed 'the failure to live'. Which is to say, many of his poems speak of, or in the voice of, characters who, through fear, are unable to fulfill their own buried longings. They fail to live through failure to seize hold of either evil or good (even). They just refrain.

A significant shift occurs with Eliot's conversion, however: he begins to see that renunciation might not indicate a failure to live, but rather quite the opposite. Here is Raine:

The romantic Eliot regretted the buried feelings left unfulfilled and rued the cautious circumspection of our sluggish hearts. The ascetic Eliot, though, could see the virtue of renunciation - and its difficulty. He writes, therefore, about the failure of feeling in poems like 'Gerontion' 'Animula' and The Hollow Men. At the same time, in Ash-Wednesday, he shows us the worthy obverse of this position - the ascetic renunciation which chooses to turn its back on pleasure, on the temporal, on sensuous emotion, on the self itself, the better to embrace eternal verities. And finds that his will to renounce the temporary illusion of the temporarl is weaker than his helpless passion for the natural world.... p. 40

This feeds directly into Eliot's thinking about martyrdom, which might well be termed a 'failure to live'. But the problem comes with the will, doesn't it? Who can really honestly will his own martyrdom over against the natural world? Who is strong enough to renounce it on his own? Eliot himself later recognises that renunciation is not a triumph of the human will, but rather a free submission to the will of God...

(One of the other great virtues of Raine's book is a defence of Eliot from the charges of anti-semitism.)

Talking about God in public

The second tempter of the martyr Thomas in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral offers him a collaborative arrangement under the power of the king. When he rejects this, asserting instead his episcopal authority, he is accused of being merely interested in power.

The same temptation is offered under very different historical conditions by the late-modern liberal segregation of the sacred (private) from the secular. Religious people are indeed invited to take their place in the business of public reasoning, but on the condition that they jettison those components of their thinking that held by others to be ‘religious’. The most prominent contemporary exponent of political liberalism – indeed, arguably the most influential political philosopher of the last forty years – is John Rawls. Rawls began in A Theory of Justice (1971) to concur with Kant and to try to earth justice solely in a universal and abstract notion of ‘Reason’. However, in Political Liberalism (1993) he suggests the notion of ‘reasonableness’. He distinguishes this from ‘Reason’ by noting that a person acts reasonably when they are willing ‘to propose principles and standards as fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them willingly, given the assurance that others will do so’. From behind the ‘veil of ignorance’, Rawls proposes that people will choose reasonably for fair terms that will receive acknowledgement by ‘overlapping’ consensus. It would be quite possible for people to hold the same political values for quite disparate reasons: but these reasons are in the end quite irrelevant. Rawls writes provocatively, ‘[F]or the purposes of public life, Saul of Tarsus and Paul the Apostle are the same person.’ Rawls claims that this conception of justice is ‘freestanding’: it moves entirely in the practical and political world and leaves philosophy (and presumably theology) untouched. Rawls’ attempt to justify political liberalism at least has the virtue of accommodating the fact of pluralism: it (supposedly) allows for peaceful disagreements, and finds considerable space for positive agreement. Rawls wants to establish more than a modus vivendi: if groups in society are merely tolerant of one another, there is always the possibility of instability if the balance of power shifts and one group gains more power than others. His theory appears also to avoid the difficulty of appeal to some form of ‘comprehensive doctrine’ (the term he uses for ‘the contents of persons’ determinate conceptions of the good’). This modus vivendi forestalls the entry into the public space of the religious in such a way as to protect society from facing discussions about matters which may prevent the productive and safe conduct of its business. However, it also forces religious groups to speak in public only in terms of outcomes and utility, and perhaps about (their own) rights. The business of the actual concrete determination and management of justice must be carried out without reference to the ‘shadowy’ discourse of theology. Any Christian address of a controversial matter of public interest must prove itself in a measurable way, aside from its own logic. Economics is the new queen of the sciences to whom all other forms of knowledge must pay tribute. There is an option, however, delivered by postmodernity and present in the later Rawls. This is the ‘territorial’ option, whereby the religious group asserts and protects its own interests within the public sphere, usually on the basis of ‘rights’. Its speech having been excluded from the public forum, it can now only speak in the language that succeeds in that space, occupy as much of it as possible, and engage in talking mostly in an inner-directed way to its own constituency. The group may even succeed in gaining representatives of its interests elected into government office. The result is that it creates a new public space for itself, which it seeks to enlarge at the expense of other groups. To put it another way: the exclusion from the public forum of religious types of speech means that religious people feel a great difficutly at feeling their point of view is really heard in public. This situation may be accepted by some, who then have to live with the Paul/Saul bifurcation of their identities; but, for others, it is an invitation to occupy as much of the public sphere as possible without feeling the need to talk persuasively in the public sphere at all.

Eliot and the city

Some of Eliot’s most important poetry addresses and exposes the false security of urban and suburban life. The strongest polemic from an explicitly Christian perspective is found in the Choruses from ‘The Rock’ where he rails aggressively against modern civilization in all its banality as ‘the land of lobelias and tennis flannels’. Eliot declaims against the city in the manner of an Old Testament prophet. However, even his pre-conversion poetry abounds with the same themes: one thinks of the torpor of Prufrock’s bourgeois routines measuring out his life ‘in coffee spoons’ and making an epic of his boredom and petty insecurities; or of the smog that blankets the city of ‘Preludes’; or of the hallucinatory patchwork of encounters in the London, the ‘unreal city’ of The Waste Land. Even before the introduction of an explicitly Christian theme to his poetry we can see the poetry itself as presented as a revelation of the true insecurity and instability of the city of man. The powerful sense of loss and bewilderment that pervades the earlier poems is coupled to a sense of becoming numbed: the sheer grind of urban life is stupefying. What does mark out a change - and which arguably makes the earlier poetry better as poetry - is that this earlier phase you get the sense of claustraphobic entrapment in modern city life which the poet himself cannot evade: This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. In Choruses from 'the Rock' there is more over-againstness; a more polemical and critical edge, perhaps, but with also an alternative vision offered.

We see this also in Murder in the Cathedral when the chorus - who are in their way voices from Eliot's past poetry, with their description of household drudgery and imprisonment of a life lived in fear - are tempered by the group of Priests and by Thomas himself. Thomas ought to have learnt through bitter experience that civilisation is not enough to secure human life against barbarism; but the temptation to return to that safer path - to share in the construction of an apparently greater shield of protection from the worst that humans can do to one another - is very great.