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.'

Williams on Eliot

I have been reading 'The Four Quartets': breathtaking.

Rowan Williams says:

This is the pivot of the Quartets: God has borne all we bear and so has made the fabric of history his own garment. The world has no discernible meaning or pattern; but into it there has entered the compassion of God.

He continues:

Eliot was a great preacher of the gospel because he had the integrity not to close his eyes to any of the real horror of the world; preaching is cheap if it fails to meet human beings at their darkest points. The reconciliation he writes of is utterly costly, mortally hard: our sole nourishment in the task is the blood of God's costly love, the assurance that death, loss, disorder are none of them stronger than the compassion of God.

Open to Judgement, p. 218-9

'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'...

A martyr? who can say?

Robin Grove certainly is not convinced by Eliot's Thomas:

‘…he sweeps forward thourgh temptations progressively more inward, until the victory is gained…We know, because he says so. Or maybe, the doubt springs up, he has conformed God to his will, and chosen martyrdom vaingloriously after all.
There is simply no way anyone could tell. Whatever Becket’s motives, an audience can never be sure of them; only God can see his heart… Having directed us towards a light into which we cannot peer, the drama leaves un simultaneously exalted (God has given us ‘another Saint in Canterbury’) and pleasureably skeptical (the pious have been taken in by another holy fraud…).’

Perhaps the Knights are right after all? Whatever the case, Grove’s insight is that the true action of the drama, which is the nature of Thomas’ final choice and the divine verdict on it, has become ‘inaccessible to view’; and the spectators themselves become the subject of judgement by the play. Grove seems to find this turn to the audience quite unpleasant.

Robin Grove, "Pereira and After: The Cures of Eliot's Theatre " in The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot, ed. Anthony David Moody, Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 170.

Eliot the conservative, continued...

Critic Donald Davie wrote of Eliot:

...when it came to deciding what Christian sect he should join, it was of the utmost importance to him that he choose what should seem to be not a sect at all but a national norm, its normality shown in that it was backed by the secular and institutional forces of the nation-state.' (Davie, Eliot in His Time, p. 186)

What a strange thing to be said of the author of Murder in the Cathedral! Thomas is depicted as unable to accept this kind of version of Christianity (as I read it, anyhow), because it so badly domesticates Christianity... This version of Christianity's role in society owes more I think to Kant and his idea of 'religion' than it does to authentic Christianity. For his part of course Nietzche couldn't see this normality of Christianity; but then, as some have argued, Nietzche understood Christianity in its true genius better than almost anyone...

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...

Eliot spotted in the Unreal City

I was walking down a London street yesterday and saw this quite by accident. Delightful happenstance!

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.

You gotta love this city...

Author Oliver James in his book Affluenza says that Sydney (my home town) is the most vacuous city on the planet. Materialistic, craven, shallow, banal, spirit-less. Workaholic & shopaholic.

Can it be true? It is hard to dream when you feel you are in heaven already I guess:

Paul Kelly once sang:
Have you ever seen Sydney from a 727 at night?
Sydney shines such a beautiful light
And I can see Bondi through my window way off to the right
And the curling waves on a distant break
And the sleeping city just about to wake
Have you ever seen Sydney from a 727 at night?
But that beauty conceals - well, that's the trouble, it doesn't conceal anything! As the Whitlams (a great Sydney band) sang:
"My city is a whore, opened herself to the world
Jumped up and down in pastel shirts
And lathered up thinking about designs for T-shirts"

Or we could say with John Birmingham, a historian of the city: 'In the end there was, it seemed, no outrage so profane it could not come to pass in Sydney'...

Here's our old friend, TS Eliot, who never went to Sydney, but might have written these words for us:

O weariness of men who turn from God
To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action,
To arts and inventions and daring enterprises,
To schemes of human greatness thoroughly discredited.
Binding the earth and the water to your service,
Exploiting the seas and developing the mountains.
Dividing the stars into common and preferred,
Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator,
Engaged in working out a rational morality,
Engaged in printing as many books as possible,
Plotting of happiness and flinging empty bottles,
Turning from your vacancy to fevered enthusiasm
For nation or race or what you call humanity;
Though you forget the way to the Temple,
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger.

The possibility of not submitting

As Eliot shows in his drama, the renunciation of temptation leading to martyrdom is the fruit of a particular response to divine providence. Temptation occurs within an apparently dualistic framework in which the tempters (and, what’s more, the Tempter) may be seen to have an unrestricted power to attack. The doctrine of providentia dei is a reminder of the overarching monotheistic structure of Christian belief: that nothing, not even the temptation, falls outside the sovereignty of God. But, to be distinctively Christian, belief in providence must be allowed to be articulated in Trinitarian terms. So, amidst the dualism of experience with all of its peirasmoi, the martyr rests on the singularity of the Father's providence, expressed in the supreme and effective example of the Son's renunciation of temptation and his strength under trial to the point of death, and in the comforting presence of the Spirit.

The providence of the God who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself is implemented in this act of reconciliation. The self-emptying of the Son was to the extent (and further) of subjecting himself to the trails and temptations of life in the world, under the auspices of the devil, in the likeness of sinful flesh. Thus, the testimony of the martyr is not merely to a remote understanding of the divine mastery of events from outside, but in fact to the loving providential action of God in Christ from within the sphere of the human. As Colin Gunton writes:

A Christological structuring of divine providential action understands it in the light of the one who became human, identifying with the world’s structures in order to reshape them to their eschatological destiny. Incarnationally conceived action – action understood through the focus provided by the true humanity and self-giving to death of Jesus – indicates contingency but not ‘pure’ chance as the heart of the matter.

The divine being whose sovereignty is unchallengeable lives for a while ‘a little lower than the angels’; he submits himself to the possibility of not submitting.

Temptation: a sketch

By making the central part of his first act the scene of temptation, Eliot suggests that temptation - or rather, its renunciation - is a crucial matyrological theme. Of course, as an imitatio Christi martyrdoms will always find echoes of Christ's passion, including his temptation by Satan and his trial by the authorities, so it is perhaps unsurprising that temptation is a prominent theme here.

For temptation to be real requires the presence of a freedom to accept it or reject it. In fact, temptation is a moment of decision for the individual prior to the public testing before the court or in the circus, an inward crisis whose outward counterpart is the trial before the powers. This is crucial, because the martyr must be one who freely chooses not self-determining freedom but submission to the divine will.

The renunciation of temptation requires a particular understanding of divine providence. Temptation occurs within an apparently dualistic framework. The doctrine of providentia dei is a reminder of the overarching monistic/monotheistic structure of Christian belief. But it must not be allowed to be articulated in a non-Trinitarian way. So, amidst the dualism of experience, the martyr rests on the singularity of the Father's providence, expressed in the supreme and effective example of the Son's renunciation of temptation and his strength under trial, and the comforting presence of the Spirit.

The Lord's Prayer is an interesting example of both perspectives: the Father is in heaven and rules - that is the basis of the prayer; yet we pray that his kingdom may come and his will may be done.

We must note the biblical words massah and peirasmos both mean 'trial' and 'temptation'. The seperation of the two concepts linguistically is a feature of later Latin theology. The temptation idea is more closely linked to the work of Satan and is designed as a trap; the test comes from God and is designed to strengthen the believer. The tricky text is the prayer 'lead us not into temptation': can he or would he do this? Can we really get around the problem with the rendering 'trial'?

Strangely perhaps, the early martyr-acts do not depict temptation stories, though they do depict trials and tests of course.

The Temptation to do good

'Sin grows with doing good', Eliot has his martyr say.

Alongside invitations to do quite marvellous works of piety and love, lies the temptation to somehow seek pride in them, or to use them manipulatively, or to love God less because of them.

The devil tempted Jesus to make bread and to share in rule and to save himself, all in themselves not bad things. The goodness of creation itself and serving its needs, which are real and authentic goods, can be extremely diverting from the ultimate purpose of human life, its worship of God.

The story of Mary and Martha - which I always found to be a great rejoinder to people obsessed with housework! - perhaps is suggestive of this. Martha is busy in doing good, doubtless. But her good spills over into her fury with her sister; and earns her a famous rebuke. Was Cain's sin likewise not the ungood of his offering, but his envy of his brother (see I John 3)?

Little Gidding

Today we went on a journey to Little Gidding, the place that inspired TS Eliot's poem. In the early 17th century there was a religious community there, founded by the Farrar family.
It is a remote and out of the way place. We visited the tiny church, and then went next door to the tea room for refreshments. I hadn't brought any cash with me, but being a tourist site of a kind I expected that I could pay for tea by debit card.

We were welcomed at the door like lost relatives by the couple who are now wardens of the property, Rev Tony and Judith Hodgson. I asked if they took cards: they wouldn't hear of it, and gave us all tea and cakes and juice. We were treated to a slide show detailing the history of Little Gidding and the communities who have lived and prayed there.

Eliot only went there once, on a May afternoon in 1936:

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone.

These words come now to life... I can see the rough road, and the pig-sty, the dull facade of the little church building, and the Farrar tombstone in front of it. Charles 1, the 'broken king' on the run from the Roundheads, sought solace Little Gidding in 1646 after coming here in more peaceful times.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Somehow, for once, tourism became pilgrimage.


http://www.littlegiddingchurch.org.uk/

Trying to get a handle on my project...

Some people seem to be able to trot out their complete doctoral thesis outline at an early stage.

This is not me. My work seems to be more evolutionary... I am try not to lose my nerve over this of course! The worst moments are when someone asks you 'so, what is your thesis on?' and nothing much coherent or convincing comes out of your mouth. Arghh!

However: here is an attempt to get my thoughts together at this stage, almost a third of the way through (!). Please feel free to chip in your two cents worth, and please excuse the academic-ese:

What kind of self is a Christian martyr? This dissertation seeks to explore and expound Christian identity via the motif of martyrdom. Martyrdom is the possibility latent in the Christian identity, for all Christians are called to the ‘witness’ or ‘testimony’ (martyrion) that might result in bloody martyrdom.[1] As Balthasar writes:

…this does not mean that every single Christian must suffer bloody martyrdom, but he must consider the entire case as the external representation of the inner reality out of which he lives.[2]

Christian baptism is a symbol of the offering of the old self over to death which is what every Christian does as an identification with Jesus Christ. It is a kind of proto-martyrdom, with its act of testimony to Christ and renunciation of the world, the flesh and the devil.[3] The martyr ‘externally represents’ the church’s way of understanding both the world and the situatedness of the self in that world. It is an understanding which the martyr shows is not merely theoretical, for in the act of offering of the body to its own destruction it is revealed as concrete. At the point of the sword, the testimony of the martyr to another reality intersects – fatally – with the material world. An analysis of martyrdom thus suggests itself as a way to understand Christian identity, both on its own terms and in comparison with alternatives.

However, we must surely be aware of how dissonant this witness is with non-theological conceptions of human meaning and purpose. Part of this dissonance lies in the inevitable association of martyrdom with the spectacle of horrendous religious violence that is the signs of our times. As the suicide bomber shows, the line between killing and dying for a cause is all too thin: to the secular mind the two are barely distinguishable as species of insanity.[4] The association of martyrdom with fanaticism, religious violence and the spectacle of suffering complicates discussion about the meaning of martyrdom as a self-narration. It is a problematic and contested discourse – perhaps supremely so. How might a discourse characterized by the notion of the ‘authentic’ self (for example) accommodate the possibility of self-abnegation to the kind and degree that the martyr demonstrates? Martyrdom – even the possibility of martyrdom – seems to be the enemy of human potential. True, it may be freely determined (though only as a form of suicide), but it is given away too cheaply; it has too little regard for the ties of family and friends; it is too committed to a notion of ‘truth’ which has fallen into disrepair...

In order to elucidate martyrdom as a way of seeing the self, this study makes use of T.S. Eliot’s martyrological drama Murder in the Cathedral (1935) as a lens by which to focus the theme. In the instance of Eliot’s literary creation Thomas we are given an imaginative reflection on martyrdom in the Christian tradition as a whole.


[1] See e.g. Mt 10:18f.
[2] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Moment of Christian Witness, Communio Books (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), p. 22
[3] Origen makes the connection between the baptismal promises and the test of martyrdom explicit in his Exhortation to Martyrdom. Origen, An Exhortation to Martyrdom; Prayer; First Principles, Book Iv; Prologue to the Commentary on 'the Song of Songs'; Homily Xxvii on 'Numbers', trans. Rowan A. Greer, The Classics of Western Spirituality. (London: S.P.C.K, 1979), iii.17, p. 157-8
[4] As Salman Rushdie puts it:: ‘Only fanatics go looking for martyrdom.’ Salman Rushdie, Step across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002 (London: Vintage, 2003), p. 240