It is easy to complain of Eliot’s negativity, or “pessimism,” because most of us do not have the honesty to risk seeing the world in that way—the vision of a heart of darkness, of people devouring and being devoured, where we are all old, weighed down with terrible knowledge and guilt.

            After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

The man who wrote these lines was a man who spent years living with the slow and irreversible mental breakdown of his wife. Who, in such a situation, would not be tormented with self-doubt and self-reproach, asking always, “Could I have made it otherwise? Have I done this?” It is hardly possible to estimate what it cost Eliot finally to separate from his wife in 1932. It is the experience of those years especially that we read in these appalling early poems, the geography of an emotional and spiritual desert that most of us are spared. What is the gospel and the church to such a man? Before all else it is, indeed, a refuge, “the Garden, Where all love ends”: the place where God mercifully kills and dismembers, leaving the scattered bones “under a tree in the cool of the day with the blessing of sand, Forgetting themselves and each other.” Lazarus is asleep; if he sleepeth, he shall do well.

Eliot was also a man who was exceptionally alive to the possibilities of illusion and self-deception in human lives. He had come to baptism seeking not only rest, but also truth. He was well aware that it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of a living God. Christ the tiger: us he devours. “Teach us to care and not to care,” he wrote, knowing that the detachment of the enlightened soul was, at most, half of the Christian life. God still calls to us in time, in the world, calls us to “care,” to the continuing pain of involvement, calls to a future.

                                                                                    …let me

Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,

The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.

No, Lazarus is to be allowed no luxury of rest, no easy and total rejection of the world, no “death sentences…on…ordinary lives.” “Redeem the time”: God’s word has been spoken in and to the unclarities, trivialities, bestialities of the world of history; there, and nowhere else, is the poet to hear and proclaim it. “Would it have been worthwhile?” Who can say? But Lazarus is commanded out of the grave, “come back to tell you all,” and that command, the command of the fleshly and worldly God who wept for the dead man he loved, cannot be refused by a man who knows he has risked exposure to a terrible and unanswerable truth.

It is the crucifying demand of this incarnate truth that Eliot set out to explore in what was consciously his last major poetic enterprise, the Four Quartets. This extraordinary sequence, constantly turning back upon itself, replying to itself, qualifying, correcting, has regularly been read as if it added nothing to Eliot’s earlier poems, as if it simply repeated his weariness and longing for a reposeful death. In fact, these poems state, not always clearly, but always with both clarity and passion, the full implication of the struggle to “redeem the time.” “Burnt Norton,” not at first intended as the beginning of a sequence, explores the idea of the escape from time into the timeless within the momentary stillness of ecstasy. It concludes, however, in near despair. If the truth is only in the timeless moment, the flash of meaning, what of the “waste sad time / Stretching before and after”? It is not redeemed or transformed, only forgotten, and that is not enough because (as “East Coker” and “The Dry Salvages” make clear) it cannot cope with, cannot heal, the pain of mortality, the anguish and despair of human beings living in a senseless world that seems no more than a vortex of destruction.

Where, then, is healing? Here Eliot is at his most stark: there is no escape, except into fantasy. There is only a penetrating further into the blackness and destructiveness of the world. Face the truth; face the fact that the world is a world of meaninglessness, of destruction, violence, death, and loss, that no light of ecstasy can change this. Only when we stop projecting patterns on to the world can we live without illusion, and living without illusion is the first step to salvation. “Only through time time is conquered.” And here the starkness gives way to gospel. If there is a God whose will is for the healing of men and women, he can heal only by acting in the worldliness of the world, in and through the vortex of loss and death. He must share the condition of our sickness, our damnation, so as to bring his life and his fullness into it.

            The wounded surgeon plies the steel

            That questions the distempered part;

            Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

            The sharp compassion of the healer’s art

            Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

This is the pivot of the Quartets: God has borne all that we bear and so has made the fabric of history his own garment. The world has no discernable meaning or pattern, but into it there has entered the compassion of God. Give up the futile struggle to dominate and organize the chaos of the world in systems and mythologies, and realize that the empty destitution of confronting darkness is the only way in which love can begin. Only if we are honest about the world can we see the choices that confront us. Either there is only destruction and death, or there is destruction and death that we can take into ourselves to let it burn away our self-obsession and so make room for active love, compassion, mutual giving, life in communion. And the only sign of this possibility is the ambivalent memory of a dead and betrayed man.

            The dripping blood our only drink,

            The bloody flesh our only food.

We have to choose, but these, no other, nothing easier, are the choices. If all time is to be redeemed, it must be by giving up of self in all times and places, accepting the horror and the darkness, and not trying to evade them by fantasy or philosophy. The way has been shown by the action of the world’s Maker and Lord emptying himself and taking servant’s form, putting aside his lordship to suffer our wounds so that his compassion becomes the food by which we live.