Life Illumined
On a Couplet by T.S. Eliot
Having been invited to give a lecture on the theme of this year’s Rimini Meeting, I was privileged to do so this afternoon. You can find a recording of the lecture, given in Italian, here. Below is an English version.
In the vacant places / we will build with new bricks
The human urge to build runs deep. Archaeologists trace our race’s history through the evidence of settlements, whether dwellings for the living or tombs for the dead. Scripture, too, shows man forth as builder, but this trait is acquired, not original.
‘In the beginning’ there were no houses. Primordial man lived in a garden, at ease with a creation well disposed to him. Boundaries between himself and other creatures were uncalled-for. In Eden, all Adam needed to thrive was laid out before him. For food he had ‘every plant yielding seed’. He drank from a paradisal river, the sweetness of whose waters we, poor banished children of Eve, cannot imagine.
In the first stage of man’s existence, that of innocence, Eden was a congenial habitat; at the same time, it symbolised a more vital harmony. What truly gave life to man, and joy, was not just the abundance of the land; it was his Godlikeness.
Later sages would celebrate this mode of being by virtue of dim remembrance when they spoke of it as an indwelling. A Psalm titled, ‘A Prayer of Moses, the man of God’, begins with the line, ‘Lord, you have been our dwelling place’. Centuries later, St Paul spoke of God as the ultimate reality in which ‘we live and move and have our being’, citing Greek poetry’s best intuitions back to the Athenians. Moses and Paul had known divine intimacy. The first had been enveloped by God’s Presence, remaining aglow with a radiance not of this earth. The second had been caught up to the third heaven. Neither, though, had known, like Adam, a state of being in which God was an all-sufficient principle of subsistence. The communion with God which for man before the fall was the human condition as such is known to us now only in graced flashes. It remains, though, the norm towards which we strive as humanity rises towards the eschaton where God shall again be ‘all in all’.
This framework imparts a lesson: it is right that we should use our choicest efforts to build the earthly city beautifully. Yet any building is provisional, a nomad’s tent made to protect us for a while on our earthly journey, but destined for redundancy when, at the opportune time, our eternal goal is reached.
The garden in which Adam, on the sixth day, was placed is called ‘paradise’. The name is Persian. It suggests a pleasure grove, not a public park. Eden was a sanctuary, a garden enclosed. Adam and Eve, present there as Gods’s guests, could be shut out of it, and were. The foundation of society, Biblically speaking, rests on a knack for receiving, enjoying, and honouring hospitality. Countless works have been written about the dynamics of welcome and guest-friendship in the ancient world.
Some study the customs of nomads whom a fierce environment put at each other’s mercy. Courtesy emerged as a contractual form by which one might survive the vicissitudes of nature. For nature, while not being hostile to man, is unconcerned for him. Others examine the conventions of Homeric heroes, prepared to entertain both human beings and gods. The Bible respects this archaic hospitable ideal. Abraham, a nomad called to leave his father’s house, embodies the attentiveness of antique hosts in the scene set at Mamre, where three men turn up out of nowhere ‘in the heat of the day’ to find this weathered Hebrew a model of promptness, preparing in no time at all, at 99, a feast at which he waited. Some Fathers saw this story as a revelation of the Trinity, a concept of God himself as hospitable communion. This view was depicted by Andrei Rublyov in the fifteenth century. Rublyov’s icon The Hospitality of Abraham was painted in the midst of civilisational collapse. In 1966, when a world still weary from World War II feared nuclear armageddon, another Russian visionary, Andrei Tarkovsky, picked up the same motif of man inviting God in for refreshment. The mystery Rublyov had traced in colour lit up in black-and-white on celluloid as a beacon by which we might just possibly still save ourselves.
When the city, an image of settled life and enterprise, appears in Scripture, there is ambivalence attached. The first city we hear of was built by Cain, the fratricide who had to sustain a ‘mark’ that set him apart from the rest of mankind. The mark of Cain spelt divine protection, not as a reward, but as a reminder that even great misdeeds can, without dissimulation, be held by an economy of mercy. The mark of Cain exhorts us never to reduce others simply to their crimes. The mark was the Almighty’s way of enacting a principle later articulated thus: ‘Vengeance is mine, and recompense, for the time when their foot shall slip.’
Man, God knew, cannot be trusted with justice unaided. He is too apt to let his passions get the better of him, going to extremes. This is what turned out to happen in history as Scripture recounts it. Within just six generation from Cain, and no more than a few lines on in a single Biblical chapter, we find Lamech boasting of his violent prowess as he tells his wives, a captive audience: ‘If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.’ Within this spiral we still live.
The fourth chapter of Genesis confronts us with a paradox. When Cain is called to account for having murdered Abel, the Lord says to him:
Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.
Two typologies of archaic existence (that of the shepherd nomad and that of the tiller of the ground) are closed to him; the first on account of estrangement Cain brought on himself, the second on account of God’s sanction. The only assurance God can give is that he will not be surrendered to jungle justice. So what might Cain do? ‘Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a city’, וַיְהִי בֹּנֶה עִיר. The city emerges as a format in which man at odds with his kin and their covenant-existence can eke out a living on other terms, those of pragmatic transactions. Urban living stands for a stationary mode of being ‘a fugitive and a wanderer’, cut off from the nomadic tribal progress that moves, day by day, in pursuit of shared goals.
Having built a city for himself, Cain ‘named it Enoch after his son Enoch’. There is pathos in this naming. History’s first murderer knew how fragile life can be east of Eden. Unable to trust filiation as a means by which to pass life on, Cain felt drawn to leave a monumental legacy. It would no doubt have been unprepossessing: the artisan who developed the ‘bronze and iron tools’ needed to shape matter gracefully was Cain’s great-great-great-great-grandson Tubal-cain. Life in Enoch, the filial substitute, is evoked in Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal: ‘Race of Cain! in caves and huts/Shiver like jackals in the mire.’ The poet offers a dreadful perspective on transactional society, reminding us that man-as-builder, homo faber, is at times a desperate fellow haunted by rumours of a paradise lost and a fear of loneliness.
The association of city living with unhealthy compromise is grandly shown in the story of Babel, the Bible’s first metropolis. The fated project began with the call: ‘Come, let us build a city for ourselves’, נִבְנֶה-לָּנוּ עִיר. The ‘for ourselves’ is ominous. It points towards a clean break with even a reference to divine purpose. Babel’s projected tower, ‘with its top in the heaven’, speaks of Luciferian presumption. The mindset behind it is wondrously captured by Pieter Brueghel in a painting completed in 1563, while the continent of Europe was tearing itself apart in internecine warfare. Brueghel’s account of the Tower of Babel shows at once the impressiveness and the absurdity of certain dreams by which human beings at the same time realise their craziest ambitions and reduce themselves to ant-like insignificance.
The story of how humanity’s nostalgia for the garden came to yield to the city’s pragmatic necessity is told in the story of Israel’s exodus. It sets out from tragedy. A new king arisen in Egypt had a quarrel with ‘the Israelite people’. He had forgotten what the Pharaonic state owed to Joseph. Political alliances based on indebtedness are fickle. Why? They presuppose a shared remembrance commonly perceived as tying nations or groups together. Such memories may last a generation, perhaps, at a stretch for two generations; but by the time the third has grown up it will have no more substance than yesteryear’s snow. Three siblings arose in Israel to guide their kinsmen out of captivity back to the land promised to their ancestors.
We know what trials Moses and Aaron went through, with Miriam never far away, in order for Pharaoh to let Israel go. As the people passed beyond the physical borders of Pithom and Rameses, further instances of cities that were sources of no good, a further challenge arose: a vast mixed crowd stood waiting to join them. The Vulgate calls this company a vulgus promiscuum innumerabile. Some vulgarity and promiscuity will almost inevitably test a political undertaking rooted in high ideals.
During the exodus, of course, Israel was graced with the giving of the law. It showed how it is possible to live humanely on earth, attending to practical affairs while remaining conscious of transcendence. The economy of sacrifice enjoined by the Mosaic code is different from that of pagan cults. Again and again Scripture stresses that the God who revealed his name at the burning bush has nought in common with the idols of Moloch and Ashera. Israel’s God does not need to be fed. He says scathingly: ‘If I were hungry I would not tell you!’ The Biblical system of offerings was rather a way in which man was taught to regard his work in the light of an eternal purpose. The giving up of first-fruits taught people not to absolutise possessions. Perseverance in such detachment is costly. It goes against the grain of our hoarding instincts to give up for gratitude’s sake something for which we have laboured. But in this way we stand a chance of learning to live graciously. When such an attitude imbues a common life, it fills it with priceless sweetness.
The law envisaged sacrifices, too, for the sake of reparation and reconciliation. The Bible knows that human coexistence is fraught. Conflicts will arise between persons, families, and groups. It is nothing to get too excited about. It is how things are. The question is: will we let our conflicts be resolved, or will we be pickled in them? The Bible’s call to reconciliation is persistent. It touches particular infractions named and weighed, with the terms of reparation made explicit. These concrete rubrics are given, though, within the stated certainty that all men need reconciliation at some level. Such is the elevation we are called to attain that none can remain at such an altitude permanently. That is why the Law prescribes the observance of the Day of Atonement as obligatory: ‘anyone who does not practise self-denial during the entire day shall be cut off from the people’. The institution is truly democratic: it embraces all while setting the criterion for belonging. To be part of the social body is to own that I am accountable to a high standard of life by which I will fail and, so, that I am bound, before all, to say sorry. Much the same reality is enacted in the Church’s liturgy of Ash Wednesday. A human community held together by shared public confession of inadequacy will be able to deal with hurts and to pursue justice free of self-righteousness, preserved from a mindset that is merely litigious.
While sojourning in the wilderness, Israel was told to construct the tabernacle, the place in which the vertical axis of grace intersected with horizontal cares. The tabernacle was a pilgrimaging thing. The process by which it became eventually fixed was fraught. When David first thought of building a temple, he was rebuked: ‘Whenever I moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever say: “Why have you not built me a house of cedar?”’ The plan was regarded suspiciously, as if man was trying to hem God in. But after a while the building of a house of God was authorised. It was the first grand building site since Babel, if we disregard Pharaonic excesses. All took part. The work of building made people one. All had something to give, whether skills or riches. Once the temple was completed under Solomon and God’s glory rested on it, the concept of the city was somehow redeemed.
Jerusalem will henceforth be the paradigm of ordered collectivity: a human compact made possible by the Real Presence within it. To the City of David the twelve tribes went up; but that was not all. The universalist note implicit in particular calls (already Abram was told, ‘in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed’) became explicit in the temple’s significance: ‘all nations shall stream to it’. Israel learnt to accommodate hangers-on desirous of living in the light of the covenant without taking steps to enter it. The ‘resident alien’ plays a key part in Israel’s story, recalling the people’s own exile: ‘You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.’ The presence in the midst of this self-conscious nation of strangers and misfits remained a providential irritant, a test of integrity in retrospect as well as prospect. By it God verified whether Israel stayed mindful of the misery from which it, by grace, had been saved; and whether it stayed minded to stake out a future whose promise would embrace everyone. At times of failure in either respect, God sent his people forth anew into exile. He caused Jerusalem to fall, displaying the impermanence of felt stability on earth, compelling those with eyes to see to re-set their moral compass in view of rebuilding.
It is into this deeply Biblical dynamic, manifest in manifold ways through the centuries, that T.S. Eliot speaks in his rousing couplet from The Rock: ‘In the vacant places / we will build with new bricks’. He consciously drew the work from Scriptural cadences, writing ‘under the inspiration of, chiefly, Isaiah and Ezekiel’. The Rock was a pageant play commissioned for a fundraising stunt to aid construction of 34 new churches in Greater London. First performed in May 1934, it was intended for a broad audience. Eliot called it ‘a venture on a wider sea than before’.
The bracing sea air suited him. He was glad to shake off his reputation for ‘intellectualism’ and ‘obscurity’, noting that ‘nobody with anything to say wants to be obscure’, only to add: ‘But one isn’t naturally simple or lucid; it takes work and experience to get there.’ The play puts before us the efforts of a church-building community. Many had a hand in its dialogues. Eliot disclaimed them, owning as his only the ten choruses, written to punctuate the drama. When asked to contribute to The Rock he was 45, in media vitae, seeming to himself to ‘have exhausted my meagre poetic gifts, and to have nothing more to say’. He later compared his work on this play to ‘the effect that vigorous cranking sometimes has upon a motor car when the battery is run down’. The cranking worked. A year later he went on to write Murder in the Cathedral.
In 1934 Britain was rising from the Great Depression. The national focus was on material recovery. Eliot evokes
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
The very rhythm makes you think of a steam train or of a printing press spewing out the daily paper. Who at such a time, in such a climate would wish to build churches? The Church ‘does not seem to be wanted / In country or in suburbs; and in town / Only for important weddings’. It is reduced, or has reduced itself, to an ornament of godless, self-sufficient society. The truly vacant places, as Eliot saw it, were not the suburbs, but a more intimate reality: ‘The desert is in the heart of your brother’.
Eliot’s voice rings with urgency. He pinpoints tendencies we have seen to be corrupting: selfishness, presumption, envy, the relativisation of good and evil, forgetfulness of God. These ageless passions insinuate themselves into fashions we can recognise in our time: ‘I have given you my Law’, says the Lord, ‘and you set up commissions’. Later ‘the wind’ voices an epitaph on ‘decent godless people’ whose land is reclaimed by thistles and thorns, ‘Their only monument the asphalt road / And a thousand lost golf balls.’ The poet’s acerbic tone has not lost its bite.
It may seem that nothing is new under the sun in man’s being torn between an inward ‘crying for life beyond life, for ecstasy not of the flesh’ and a lazy admission that ecstasy is simply ‘too much pain’. Eliot insists, though, that there is in his day disquieting newness. In the seventh chorus he observes:
it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.
Men have left God not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before.
This eclipse of the supernatural seemed strange in 1934. Now we take it for granted. The new norm is to have no norms. All the while, society’s fabric is rending. We speak of integration, but into what? We surround ourselves with walls, but have we a hearth round which to gather? Eliot noted, ‘Where there is no temple there shall be no homes’. Once humanity has no concept of finality, there is no incentive to seek fellowship: ‘A thousand policemen directing the traffic / Cannot tell you why you come and where you go’. Israel’s release from slavery launched the people together on a homebound exodus. We in our time break bonds, real or imagined, in view of dispersal, guided by no principle beyond self-interest. Estrangement is our lot. The legacy of Cain overshadows us even if the cities we live in are rich gated enclaves.
‘The soul of Man must quicken to creation.’ To enable quickening is the great Christian task today. ‘In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light’, yet we long for it, each of us summoned to be ‘The visible reminder of Invisible Light’. The church we must build first of all is the one that makes of us ‘a habitation of God in the Spirit, the Spirit which moved on the face of the waters like a lantern set on the back of a tortoise’. Our progress may be slow. That is no matter. What is crucial is that truth’s light is kindled and the voice of the absolute resounds in a world beguiled by trifles. The Church has essential words for our times, words no one else speaks:
She tells them of Life and Death, and of all they would forget.
She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.
She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts
Above all she tells them where genuine happiness lies, and freedom. The Church is tasked to show society what it might become. However insignificant she may appear, or think herself to be, she ‘is nonetheless a lasting and sure seed of unity, hope and salvation for the whole human race.’ She fosters nations while keeping alive the dream of universal brotherhood. She seeks to equilibrate justice and mercy, sustainably to integrate otherness, to mobilise social coherence by formulating positive tasks, to foster patriotic loyalty while eschewing chauvinism.
This endeavour of hers has prospered in the past, in glorious flashes here and there, when societies have been built hospitably, teaching men to live graciously as guests and accountably as hosts to one another. Can this ideal be pursued without some faith in a benign and personal transcendence that invests human intercourse with grace? Hardly. So we must roll up our sleeves with fortitude:
Where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone
Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers
Where the word is unspoken
We will build with new speech
— a building fit to last, not just for a season, but arising as a sure foundation for the eternal dwellings. What is lost to our anxious, often anguished age is a firm notion of the purpose of society. Polemics about keeping taxes down and strangers out stand no chance of unifying people. There is a vacancy right where population is at its densest. That is where our building work must happen to articulate and exemplify what redeemed humanity looks like with its iconic, God-like potential restored. For what man needs to flourish is not just a house, but a home where the light is on. To build one, love is called for. Love is the furnace in which ‘new bricks’ are baked to resist the passing of time. ‘Visible and invisible, two worlds meet in Man; / Visible and invisible must meet in His Temple’. Only when that temple has been built and we have become that temple shall our work, pragmatic and poetic, be done. Not before.
