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form of thought that affirms negatives, such as liberalism, rather than a
particular end, in this case Salvation as Christians understand it, is rep–
rehensible and divisive. Eliot valued cultural coherence and could not see
that culture might be realized absent religion. Donoghue is certainly
right to stress that this latter view deserves serious attention, and that it
has been too easily dismissed and denigrated; but why people might not
be wild about finding themselves once more the citizens of a Christian
society surely is not obscure. The terrible weight of historical faith in
ends
has fallen brutally on those of other faiths, or of little faith, or with–
out faith. Most of us are profoundly relieved, and grateful,
to
be able to
live in a secular society-free of the despotism of absolute religious ends.
Eliot's religion-as Donoghue emphasizes-arises from and centers
on his overwhelming dread of the void.
It
is his hypersensitivity in this
respect, I think, that accounts for his lugubrious authority over so much
literary judgment for so long, for his fixation on vulgarity, and for his
disgust with life. I find it curious that those, like Eliot, who are over–
whelmed by dread of the void never seem
to
consider that their hyper–
sensitivity may be an unreliable guide
to
religious conviction, might
itself lead them to sin or, in a lesser vein, intellectual error. Instead it is
taken without scruple as token of one's superiority of sensibility and
intellecrua I rigor.
Though Eliot's immense overemphasis on the void may make him a
poor religious mentor, it's unquestionably a driving power in his poetry,
the origin of his best and most moving writing. "The poetry," as
Donoghue elegantly puts it, "does not depend upon a doctrine professed
but upon a doctrine felt." And this is as true for Donoghue-and for
me-in
Four Quartets
as in
The Waste Land.
The religious struggle of
the poet is not, in these last poems, abstracted, but enacted through a
form that Donoghue aptly speaks about in terms of music-that is,
through a medium in which pattern and thought, feeling and meaning,
are fused. Many readers have found these poems
to
be out of touch with
flesh and earth, a disconnected ivory-tower kind of writing. Donoghue
is responsive
to
this point of view, but argues ably against it. The poems
take the form of a struggle between, as he puts it, ignorance and pur–
pose. He conveys with delicacy and care the shifts and vagaries of this
struggle-a struggle that, as he shows, takes a rugged, difficult route and
ends with daunting renunciations. ln Donoghue's account, the poems
say that against the grip of meaninglessness or the moment's ecstatic
glimpse of divinity we arc all equally ill-equipped. Language-our best
instrument of meaning-making-isn't up to the task, and yet has
to
do.
What it can do, and docs beautifully, makes its inadequacy all the more
