Lazarus: In Memory of T.S. Eliot

It is not despair, but rather an unflinching honesty about the real horrors of the world, that characterizes Eliot’s later poems.

By Rowan Williams

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one settling a pillow by her head,

            Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.

            That is not it, at all.”

 

 

It is easy enough for the hostile critic to complain: Eliot is a Manichee, a despiser of the world and its joys, a death’s head at the feast, passing “poetic death sentences on millions of ordinary lives,” in Stephen Spender’s words. Is he incapable of love? All those wretched clerks and secretaries, the amateur seducers and the amateur whores, the tired neurotic ladies in their endless afternoons, the old men in a dry month, Prufrock, Sweeney, Phlebas the Phoenician, all of them pictured in that unique mixture of scorn and pity—does Eliot never see a fuller world, a fuller life beyond this? Cannot he at least wish them joy? But no, he stands and looks at these figures with perfect clarity and total helplessness.

 

            Well! and what if she should die some afternoon…?

 

Eliot does not, in these early poems, turn from the world; he anatomizes it, unveils the skull beneath the skin. Is humanity no more than apeneck Sweeney and the Thames-daughters, the exploiters and their victims? For a man with this vision to become a Christian must have seemed so bitterly appropriate to his restless and protesting friends, the activists—literary and political—who believed that if the human condition was painful, it must be changed, not alternately wept over and despised. Eliot’s baptism, in those people’s eyes, merely set the final seal on his devaluing of humanity: the pose of the helpless observer was now fixed for ever by the myths of sin and redemption. All that nature can do is sit and wait for grace.

 

“Ash Wednesday” and the Ariel poems, Eliot’s first Christian writings, must have confirmed this ten times over.

 

            Those who sit in the style of contentment, meaning

Death

            Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning

Death.

 

and

 

I should be glad of another death.

 

Lazarus had died, baptized into the death of Christ, and was yet condemned to go back to the world, a world unchanged from the one he had known before, pitiable and trivial, and now more alien than ever. It is not wholly surprising, then, that the first reactions should be these naked reductions, the longing for a return to the grave. And so, the pilgrimage away from reality continues, reaching its climax in the abstruse mystical paradoxes of the Four Quartets—the final escape into a motionless eternity.

 

            To be conscious is not to be in time.

 

It is easy enough to say all this, and critics will continue saying it for a long time yet. It is less easy to enter into the sensibility of a man for whom the consciousness of being human was so constantly and nakedly the consciousness of pain and failure, loss of simplicity and single-heartedness:

 

            Where are the eagles and the trumpets?

            Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps.

            Over buttered scones and crumpets

            Weeping, weeping multitudes

            Droop in a hundred A.B.C.’s.

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.

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.

The pain will not go away; the horror will remain. Yet it is shot through with the hope and the possibility of compassion and reconciliation, a simplicity “costing not less than everything.”

If we can consent to this, to making out of chaos a network of compassion and of giving to others, then there is redemption and reconciliation in the world of history. Past and present alike may be folded into this; we shall be able to see ourselves as living from the love of previous generations, in communion with living and dead. We shall be able to give ourselves for the life of the living and the unborn. “Little Gidding” pictures unforgettably this fusion of death and life, the fire and the rose, the transformation of inevitable death by offering it for the world. The pain will not go away; the horror will remain. Yet it is shot through with the hope and the possibility of compassion and reconciliation, a simplicity “costing not less than everything.”

 

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 even death, loss, disorder are not stronger than the compassion of God. “Prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action,” all our responses to God, are not just our efforts; they are drawn by love, made possible by love, fulfilled by love—our compassion created and sustained by God’s.

 

            We only live, only suspire

            Consumed by either fire or fire.

 

No optimism, no activism will do that does not grow out of the vision of these two fires, the unbearable violence and the unbearable compassion. The Christian will be content with nothing else: Christians are baptized in the sign of the cross and celebrate in their eucharist the violent death of God until his coming again. For Christians, the fire of which Eliot writes is the fire of the Holy Ghost, by whom and in whom Lazarus—and all of us—shall live for evermore.

Rowan Williams was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury until his retirement in 2012. He was master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, from 2013 until 2020. He is also a well-known writer, theologian, and poet. 

This essay first appeared in A Ray of Darkness: Sermons and Reflections by Rowan Williams, published in the United States in 1995 by Cowley Publications, a division of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of SPCK Publishing. You can find Williams’s latest work, Candles in the Dark: Faith, Hope and Love in a Time of Pandemic, for preorder on their website here