T. S. Eliot's distrust of secular humanism and disdain for empty words

T. S. Eliot is my favorite poet and the fine philosopher Roger Scruton is always worth reading, so this lengthy Scruton essay on Eliot (originally published in The Intercollegiate Review in 2008) is, not surpringly, a very helpful guide to the thought and work of Eliot. This passage has some good food for thought about modernity, language, and heresy:

Eliot's deep distrust of secular humanism – and of the socialist and democratic ideas of society which he believed to stem from it – reflected his critique of the neo-romantics. The humanist, with his myth of man's goodness, is taking refuge in an easy falsehood. He is living in a world of make-believe, trying to avoid the real emotional cost of seeing things as they are. His vice is the vice of Edwardian and "Georgian" poetry – the vice of sentimentality, which causes us not merely to speak and write in clichés, but to feel in clichés too, lest we should be troubled by the truth of our condition. The task of the artistic modernist, as Eliot later expressed it, borrowing a phrase from Mallarmé, is "to purify the dialect of the tribe": that is, to find the words, rhythms, and artistic forms that would make contact again with our experience – not my experience, or yours, but our experience, the experience that unites us as living here and now. And it is only because he had captured this experience – in particular, in the bleak vision of The Waste Land – that Eliot was able to find a path to its meaning.

He summarizes his attitude to the everyday language of modern life and politics in his essay on the Anglican bishop Lancelot Andrewes, and it is worth quoting the passage in full:

To persons whose minds are habituated to feed on the vague jargon of our time, when we have a vocabulary for everything and exact ideas about nothing – when a word half-understood, torn from its place in some alien or half-formed science, as of psychology, conceals from both writer and reader the utter meaninglessness of a statement, when all dogma is in doubt except the dogmas of sciences of which we have read in the newspapers, when the language of theology itself, under the influence of an undisciplined mysticism of popular philosophy, tends to become a language of tergiversation – Andrewes may seem pedantic and verbose. It is only when we have saturated ourselves in his prose, followed the movement of his thought, that we find his examination of words terminating in the ecstasy of assent. Andrewes takes a word and derives the world from it. . . .[1]

For Eliot, words had begun to lose their precision – not in spite of science, but because of it; not in spite of the loss of true religious belief, but because of it; not in spite of the proliferation of technical terms, but because of it. Our modern ways of speaking no longer enable us to "take a word and derive the world from it": on the contrary, they veil the world, since they convey no lived response to it. They are mere counters in a game of cliché, designed to fill up the silence, to conceal the void which has come upon us as the old gods have departed from their haunts among us.

That is why modern ways of thinking are not, as a rule, orthodoxies, but heresies – a heresy being a truth that has been exaggerated into falsehood, a truth in which we have taken refuge, so to speak, investing in it all our unexamined anxieties and expecting from it answers to questions which we have not troubled ourselves to understand. In the philosophies that prevail in modern life – utilitarianism, pragmatism, behaviorism – we find that "words have a habit of changing their meaning. . .or else they are made, in a most ruthless and piratical manner, to walk the plank." The same is true, Eliot implies, whenever the humanist heresy takes over: whenever we treat man as God, and so believe that our thoughts and our words need be measured by no other standard but themselves.

Very much along the same lines as the arguments presented in Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, by Joseph Pieper. A fine book on Eliot, specifically on his Four Quartets, is Dove Descending: A Journey Into T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, by Thomas Howard. Here is part of my 2006 interview with Dr. Howard about his book:

IgnatiusInsight.com: How did Eliot, via his poetry and critical works, influence other poets and writers? What has been his impact on poetry?

Howard: Eliot had a vast influence for several decades in the English-speaking world, during which he enjoyed an eminence that few writers achieve during their lifetime.  But it gradually dawned on the academic world and the world of the arts that Eliot was extolling an unabashedly Christian vision of things, and he was virtually exiled from English departments.  He said things that the 20th century did not at all like to hear, most notably that undiluted Christian orthodoxy judges the whole modern enterprise.

IgnatiusInsight.com: Why should Eliot be read today?

Howard: Why read Eliot now?  Because he speaks of what he called "the permanent things." 

IgnatiusInsight.com: How would you describe the significance and value of Four Quartets? Is this poem a good place to first meet Eliot for those who haven't read his work before?

Howard: In my opinion, Four Quartets should take its place with other monuments that bespeak the Christian vision, e.g., Dante's work, Chartres cathedral, Bach's B-minor Mass, Mozart's Requiem, and van Eyck's painting of The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.  But there is no easy "starting point" for one approaching Eliot's work.  It is as difficult as scaling Everest–and at least as rewarding. But a new reader needs some help.

Read the entire interview; you can also read Fr. George Rutler's Foreword to Howard's book, "The Quintessential – And Last – Modern Poet", which contains this beautiful passage: "In Four Quartets, Eliot comes to the modernist's lattice window like the lover in the Song of Solomon, furtively chanting a benign proposal of which all this world's lights and shadows are intimations, and in his precise and occasionally affected diction he witnesses to the Doctors of the Church in this: the intellect is supernaturally perfected by the light of glory."