When the Eternal Can Be Met: The Bergsonian Theology of Time in the Works of C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden by Latta Corey

Author:Latta, Corey [Latta, Corey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pickwick Publications
Published: 2014-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

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T. S. Eliot’s Bergsonism “Always Present”

Incarnation and Duration in Four Quartets

I n this chapter, I will argue for a theological reading of time in The Four Quartets modeled on the Bergsonian idea of duration, previously detailed. Eliot chose to employ a Christian reading of time by incorporating Bergson’s influential ideologies, rather than drawing from biblical statements of time or on the theories of past or contemporary prominent theologians. The Four Quartets is a poem that promotes, through its reliance on Bergsonian ideas, a theological understanding of time. Four Quartets demonstrates an absorption of twentieth-century philosophy for the purpose of constructing theology. Like Bergson, Eliot will emphasize the themes of human experience in time, time’s ability to reveal deeper personal meaning, and the power of time to transform human inner states, or what Bergson called intensities . While Bergson is not known as a Christian thinker, he certainly is a twentieth-century thinker, and his ideas provide a sort of “middle ground” between secular modernism and Christianity on which Eliot constructs a redemptive view of time. As Bergson saw real duration as the conduit for deeply meaningful human experience, so Eliot sees theological time as a medium for the salvific Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. But Eliot also furthers Bergson’s notion of time as a force by depicting it as a salvific force. This chapter will show that the Four Quartets poeticizes Bergsonian intuition and duration to create a theology of experience in time. Through my Bergsonian reading the following ideas in Eliot will emerge: to experience the force of the past and the future, one must experience the spiritually charged present; to experience the redemptive that is metonymically depicted in the poem as the eternal, one must experience time; and to experience spiritual transformation, one must surrender to the workings of the divine in time.

The critical conversation on Eliot’s Four Quartets to which I am going to contribute has not yet adequately treated the relationship between Eliot’s theology and Bergsonian philosophy. In my reading of Four Quartets , I will engage the scholarship most pertinent to my analysis of the topic, and in so doing I will argue that Eliot relies on secular philosophy to articulate his theology, an argument not made by many. In order to clearly articulate my argument that Eliot framed Christian theology in Bergsonian terms, I will first survey the few scholars who have written on the relationship between Eliot and Bergson as it relates to Eliot’s depiction of time in Four Quartets .

A good preliminary reading of Eliot’s reliance on Bergson has been performed by Mary Ann Gillies, though she does not engage specific texts by Bergson. Mary Ann Gillies has written extensively on Bergson and his influence on twentieth-century thought. In her book Henri Bergson and British Modernism , Gillies devotes a chapter to Bergson’s influence on Eliot. In her chapter, “T. S. Eliot: The Poet,” Gillies argues that her discussion of Eliot’s poetry will “demonstrate its dependency on Bergson’s philosophy and will also

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