What Were the Religious Themes in Art and Literature?
Analysis of T.S. Eliot's Religion and Literature
Some other essay from that flow in Eliot'southward career every bit a social and literary critic when he was staking out the parameters of his conservative views, Religion and Literature was originally from a lecture organized by the Reverend 5. A. Demant and published in the book Faith That Illuminates. After, in 1936, Eliot himself collected the essay in his Essays Aboriginal and Modernistic, a somewhat revised version of his own earlier collection, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, from 1928.
SYNOPSIS
Eliot's apparent aim for the essay is non to bear witness who is and who is non failing to come across the bar that he sets for dealing with spiritual matters or matters of belief in literature, and then much equally to institute which "explicit ethical and theological standards" can be properly brought to bear in the realm of contemporary literature. He makes this case because he feels that literary criticism requires "a definite ethical and theological standpoint." His farther, and more urgent, bespeak is that in our own time, in that location is no understanding on what that standpoint should be, making it all that much more imperative that individuals scrutinize their reading accordingly, particularly since the "greatness" of literature "cannot be determined solely past literary standards."
In the immediate context of his remarks, Eliot specifically identifies these individuals as Christians, given the further fact that, in his view, he was as much fighting a holding action for asserting the Christian basis to European civilization as attempting to resolve this particular disquisitional puzzler. Eliot is correct in pointing out the obvious: "[M]oral judgements of literary works are made only according to the moral code accustomed past each generation, whether it lives according to that code or not." The point is indisputable: Whatever its source, notwithstanding it may categorize itself or be categorized, a moral code directs our judgments of human beliefs, including behavior that is manifested or explicated in works of literature.
The operating principle that he establishes as he commences his actual process of analysis is that his concern will exist not religious literature, "but with the awarding of our religion to the criticism of whatever literature." He does non get down to doing that, however, until he establishes the 3 senses in which one might refer to religious literature in the beginning place. Ane is in the same style as "nosotros speak of 'historical literarture' or of 'scientific literature,' " and that would constitute works that are well written and delightful to read, but whose main claim to any reader'south attention is their significance in regard to the field of effort or written report or interest that is being addressed. Another sense is every bit what is called "devotional verse." This frequently suggests the limitation, however, that that sort poetry is small poetry. At the very least, Christian poesy in English, Eliot believes, "has been limited . . . nigh exclusively to modest verse." The third sense in which one might refer to "religious literature" is in regard to works that accelerate some specific religious viewpoint. These kinds of works do not interest Eliot in his present critical effort because he wants, he says, a "literature which should be unconsciously, rather than deliberately and defiantly, Christian."
Now Eliot is ready to get down to critical issues raised by the dual topics of religion and literature. The master one is that "we neglect to realize how completely, and still how irrationally, we separate our literary from our religious judgements." Using the 19th-century English novel for his example in point, he divides the development of this separation between religion and literature into three phases. In the commencement, religion was omitted entirely from "the picture of life" that these novels portrayed. In the second, faith was "doubted, worried about, or contested." It is the third phase, the one "in which we are living," that causes Eliot the most business. From this concern of his, only the Irish novelist James Joyce is excepted, and information technology is that past now "the Christian Faith [is not] spoken of every bit annihilation but an anachronism."
The absence of the notion of a viable and living religion from contemporary literature is a serious trouble considering, in Eliot'due south view, "what we read does not concern merely something called our literary gustatory modality, but . . . affects directly, though simply amongst many other influences, the whole of what we are." Omitting organized religion from literature as anything other than as an anachronism clearly also omits it, for the contemporary reader who has no fashion of knowing whatever better, from that very "whole of what we are."
The entire matter of literature'southward more than unconscious and unintended effects upon a reader's total sensibilities, including the standing formation of his or her moral and theological standards, is at the heart of Eliot's message. "The relation of what I take been saying to the field of study announced should now exist a fiddling more apparent," he is at present finally able to declare. He continues: "Though we may read literature simply for pleasure, of 'entertainment' or of 'aesthetic enjoyment,' this reading never affects simply a sort of special sense: information technology affects us equally unabridged human beings; it affects our moral and religious existence."
Eliot does not blame or condemn the individual writer and his or her values and beliefs either, such as they are. "[W]hat a writer does to people is not necessarily what he intends to do." Indeed, Eliot can confess, quite honestly, one must imagine, that "I am non even sure that I take not had some pernicious influence myself." And so, then, information technology is non so important to describe and define the relationship between faith and literature every bit to acknowledge, and have, that in that location e'er is one. While it is "our business concern, every bit readers of literature, to know what we similar," for Christian readers, it is "our business . . . to know what we ought to similar."
Mod literature, Eliot concludes, is neither amoral nor immoral, although the implication is that information technology would exist more suitable if it were because then those attitudes would be out in the open. Rather, the problem is that it either "repudiates, or is wholly ignorant of, our near fundamental and important beliefs," thereby "encourag[ing] its readers to get what they can out of life while information technology lasts." That sort of a hedonistic arroyo toward man existence, without any reference to the soul or eternity, is well within the realm of possible reasons given for living at any time, merely Eliot's cavil is with the obviously adequate reality that, in our time, such a view is and then prevalent a i as to seem to the typically unwary consumer of contemporary literature to be the only reasonable view.
CRITICAL COMMENTARY
For the decade or more than preceding "Religion and Literature," Eliot's prose writing had been forking off in ii separate but complementary directions. In the one instance, he was investigating the constituents of what he regarded as constructive verse and dramatic verse in essays on such subjects equally Elizabethan drama and dramatists and English language metaphysical poesy, as well as on major literary figures such as William Shakespeare and Dante Alighieri. On the other hand, and in a parallel vein, he was engaging in a quasi-literary debate dealing with the limits of secular humanism equally an evolving, atheistic intellectual posture and gimmicky ameliorative for social ills. These ii areas of enquiry and critical opinion often merged in the matter of the spiritual or religious nature of human experience every bit an attribute of literary effort.
Thus, Eliot was often raising and addressing questions related to the effective advice of thought and of feeling, the connections between poetry and belief and betwixt poesy and philosophy, and the proper intellectual and historical foundations for assessing and maintaining moral and spiritual social club and activity. In "Religion and Literature," Eliot is less contentious and more analytical with regard to the topic at paw, but he is still a Christian apologist.
As Eliot sees it, in that location is but one solution to the civilization and order'due south increasing secularization of matters formerly left to religion, and it is a applied and practicable solution: Those with a view toward obtaining a religious view of life from gimmicky works of literature must work "tirelessly [to] criticize it according to our ain principles, and non but co-ordinate to the principles admitted by the writers and by the critics who discuss it in the public printing." In that location is always present in the civilisation a relation between religion and literature because they are two disquisitional components of whatsoever human culture of any time. In our own time, Eliot believes, that necessary relation must be safeguarded, fifty-fifty if but for themselves, by individuals who intendance not what the moment may bring, but what eternity may.
Categories: American Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Literature, Modernism
Source: https://literariness.org/2020/07/05/analysis-of-t-s-eliots-religion-and-literature/
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