T. S. Eliot on the Deathwork of Science and the Lifework of the Church (or better: The Faith)

In the third chapter of his The Fellowship of His Sufferings Dr. Gregory Schulz quotes T. S. Eliot:

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, bot not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death…

T. S. Eliot, Choruses, 6-12

Haunting.

I went looking for the reference and found a lot more.

(You can find all the Choruses from the Rock here. I found these verses to be more accessible than much of Eliot. You’ll enjoy reading a few lines.)

Eliot continues:

But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

In the third part, these verses:

O weariness of men who turn from GOD
To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action,
To arts and inventions and daring enterprises,
To schemes of human greatness thoroughly discredited,
Binding the earth and the water to your service,
Exploiting the seas and developing the mountains,
Dividing the stars into common and preferred,
Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator,
Engaged in working out a rational morality,
Engaged in printing as many books as possible,
Plotting of happiness and flinging empty bottles,
Turning from your vacancy to fevered enthusiasm
For nation or race or what you call humanity;
Though you forget the way to the Temple,
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger.

Reflecting, in the sixth part, on what is lost when the Faith is lost, Eliot points to the importance of God’s Word, and the sinful motivation that rebels against it.

Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws?
She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that 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.
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be.

(I think Trueman quoted this line in his The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.)

The irony of our self-deluding idolatry is captured in these lines from part seven:

But 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
That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason,
And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.
The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do
But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards
In an age which advances progressively backwards?

Eliot ends with a doxology to the Light Invisible. This entire part ten is helpful, especially with the image of the “great snake, half awake… curled… in the Pit of Iniquity” contrasted with the light and the Light. I’ve been thinking some about light and darkness (’tis the season, after all, and I was listening to Kontz and Fisk talk about it in the most recent Brief History of Power).

We thank Thee for the lights that we have kindled,
The light of altar and of sanctuary;
Small lights of those who meditate at midnight
And lights directed through the coloured panes of windows
And light reflected from the polished stone,
The gilded carven wood, the coloured fresco.
Our gaze is submarine, our eyes look upward
And see the light that fractures through unquiet water.
We see the light but see not whence it comes.
O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!