Conquering Time
Free will and predestination after grace; A theological guide to T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, the fourth of four parts
The other three articles in this series:
Eliot’s conversation with the master has ended. Does he now lose the tongue of the dead? No, not exactly. He retains it, but he cannot expect to retain it: For it must be received in the present from without. However, as he returns to the time of past and future in Little Gidding IV, he finds in every moment the same message that he received from the dead, but this time from a different source:
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.1
Before, he was merely waiting with open hands for something from without to emerge that might ground all things. Now, he knows that ground and recognizes it even in the past and the future:
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.2
He can name the ground, for he has experienced it. But there is still the pain because, from the standpoint of history, the same fragments remain fragments. One knows that each fragment is grounded in an explanation which binds all the fragments into one Word, but cannot articulate that which binds all things in terms of the fragments themselves. One cannot bring back into the cave a full explanation of the sun. Rather, the sun must remain only as a memory whose purpose in the cave is merely to undermine any satisfaction that we might have with the flickers on the wall. Having been visited by grace, the Christian carries within him a flame that is supposed to consume any resentment towards that which conflicts with our small plans, or any form of amor fati that affirms an unqualified dimness. He instead is able to receive each step up towards the sunlight as a gift from that guiding light itself, trusting that history will still be remembered at the still point.
Up to this point, action has played no role. There has only been a waiting for and then a receipt of the present in death—all of which is passive. Action has been treated as beyond irrelevant, as futile. Indeed, determined:
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by dæmonic, cththonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.3
How does Eliot respond to determinism, then? With regard to history alone, he bites the bullet. But with qualification: If every action is determined, every action festers in futility. If so, then who cares if actions are determined—what do they matter anyway? This state, described by St. Augustine as the non posse non peccare (where we are ‘not able not to sin’), is one in which we cannot help but fall short of the glory of God. The only ‘right action’ can be that which frees from this state, from history, from futility.
This may be a bit of a surprise to us. For the tradition, sin is an act and the only properly human acts are voluntary ones.4 Does our inability to ‘not sin’ imply that our sin is not a human action, and therefore not properly sinful? No, at least not exactly. In one sense, none of our actions prior to grace are ‘fully human’ (ontologically, that is) because Christ alone is the fullness of humanity. They can only be fully free, fully voluntary, insofar as they follow from Him. At the same time, though prior to the advent of grace we are not responsible for our actions in that full sense, we have still (at least by some prevenient grace) been made responsible for our attitude prior to that advent—which itself will create the possibility for that attitude to flow into history, finally rendering its recipients responsible for the actions themselves, responsible for sin.
Given that one acts well, then, he acts freely: For those deeds emerge from the standpoint of that same eternal present in which they are in act, not potency. But apart from this standpoint there are no good acts (except naturally, politically, futilely), and so neither are they free. Rather, ‘Sin is Behovely.’5 It exists in potency, and it can only become actual and thus free in a choice to repent, a choice made at the still point of reality. That choice can be made neither in history (lest it be determined) nor even from the still point (lest that point be graspable). Whatever this middle ground is, the best phrase that Eliot provides for it is ‘the ground of our beseeching.’6
From the still point, one falls back into history carrying ‘Incarnation,’ the ‘hint half guessed, the gift half understood.’ In this, ‘the past and future / Are conquered, and reconciled.’7 And the one who carries this gift participates in the reconciliation, for now his actions are no longer a ‘forever bailing… making a trip that will be unpayable / For a haul that will not bear examination.’8 Rather, ‘each venture / Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate.’9 Every single deed is now called to be a conquering of the past and future from the standpoint of the present: a rescuing of all creation from the cave. Deeds begin to matter.
On this, Eliot’s rallying-cry is ‘exploration.’ ‘Old men,’ he writes, ‘ought to be explorers.’10 But the exploration he calls us to is not horizontal, at least at first, for ‘[h]ere and there does not matter.’11 Instead,
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.12
In these final lines before ‘The Dry Salvages,’ before baptism, Eliot calls the explorer to first go deeper, dive vertically, into the still point. Only after baptism, at the very end of ‘Little Gidding,’ does the horizontal play a role, for ‘Only through time time is conquered.’13 Thus,
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;14
Here, the mystery becomes a mystery novel. The dance becomes romance. Monody becomes comedy, for each right action is an act of exploration, flowing from that beginning which one is supposed to rediscover in the end.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.15
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York, New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, Inc., 1943), LG.IV.200-206
The four poems, “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding” will be cited using their initials, followed by the section number, followed by the lines cited. For example, this footnote cites “Little Gidding,” section “IV,” lines 200 to 206.
LG.IV.207-211
BN.V.220-205
ST I-II q.74, a.1; q.6, a.1.
LG.III.156; cf. Julian of Norwich, Showings.
LG.III.199
BN.V.215, 218-219
DS.II.73, 77-78
EC.V.178-179
EC.V.202
EC.V.203
EC.V.204-209
BN.II.89
LG.V.239-245
LG.V.256-60
Nice 👌
This was super cool Mr Keith🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥