The Two Paths of Time in T.S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton"

Eliot's "Burnt Norton" is a work which masterfully handles the problem of time. Many are the avenues through which Eliot leads this query: memory, poetry, art, liturgy, Eucharist. And yet the fundamental question concerns our own response: what are we to do about time? What happens if we do nothing? Does Christianity have anything to offer this problem, and if so, what is it? Eliot, in effect, presents us with two paths, in the style of Matthew 7:13-14: there is a narrow way which leads to life and happiness, and a broad way which leads to destruction and despair. In this article, I would like to address the response of those on the narrow way and those on the broad to the problem of time, the final destination of each, and the means to arrive at that destination.

Before examining each path in particular, we need to understand the problem as Eliot has framed it. The human person finds himself a halfling of sorts, being conscious of time (the cosmic flow of events outside of man, and his own interior sense of it), and so in some way outside it: "to be conscious is not to be in time."** And yet man is bound by the limitations of time, expressed through the memory of the past, the endless flow of the present, and the uncertainty of the future, none of which can be escaped. Time, it seems, is a "ridiculous sad waste," stretching ever forward and back, and yet a queer necessity for us as humans. The quest then for Eliot is not so much to define time as to pinpoint its existential meaning.

And this is the problem those in the world (on the broad path)  cannot address. Those in the world find themselves "in a dim light...[in] neither plenitude nor vacancy," which is to say they neither feel the brilliance of eternal (timeless) beauty, nor the joyful fire of hopeful darkness. Time, for those in the world, has no meaning, no end. Rather, it is is the endless stretch, a consuming horizon sprawling ever before them and ever behind them. This endless flow robs the past of meaning, making memory a mere mausoleum, a "bowl of rose leaves" covered in dust.  There is neither meaning in the future, the present, or the past, in the same way that a sailor sees little meaning in each wave that bobbles his skiff. The problem of time is solved by decrying the problem absurd.

In what state does this leave the world, then? As "men and bits of paper, whirled about by the cold wind that blows before and after time" with "strained, time-ridden faces/distracted from distraction by distraction." In other words, Time chews men up and spits them out. Without meaning, time causes men to live lives of "quiet despair" in sensual pleasure ("appetency") and distraction, "filled with fancies and empty of meaning," because the truth of nihilism is itself too gruesome to view head-on. While for the Christian, time itself points to the meaning, for those "in the dim light" of the world, time points to nothing but the grave: "time and the bell have buried the day." And the only logical response to this is to give oneself over to appetites and sense pleasure, seeing no hope for the future and no significance in the past. Indeed, St. Paul's words ring true: "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die" (1 Cor. 15:32).

The Christian imbues time with hope and significance in Christ and His New Creation, and Eliot being a devout Anglican is quite aware of this. For the Christian, time is teleological: "the end precedes the beginning, and the end and the beginning were always there, before the beginning and after the end." According to Eliot, the Christian sees time, not as a Euclidean line extending infinitely in both directions, but more as an arrow, shot with an intended purpose contained within it from the moment the bow was taut. Time is moving somewhere, it is flowering, it is unfolding: "time past and time present are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past.". The echoes of St. Augustine's City of God are unmistakable here: time has an end, and as we shall see, that end is firmly stamped with the mark of the cross.

To what end are we drawn, then, according to Eliot? Simply put, it is "the still point": "At the still point of the turning world...there the dance is, and there is only the dance." In this point, all creation (both new and old), including time, is "made explicit, understood." At this still point, we are freed from the "practical desire," from "action and suffering," from the "enchainment" of the fleshly distractions experienced by those "filled with fancies." And yet, what is this point? And how is it a dance? It is my contention that this point is nothing else -- could be nothing else -- other than the Holy Trinity itself. What other "dance" can we imagine at the center of "the turning world," if not the "formal pattern" of exchange between the Son and the Father, whose infinite self-gift is the meaning and end of it all. Eliot himself points to this at the end of "Burnt Norton," citing Love as the "the cause and end of movement" and end of all desire. The "still point," is the entrance of the soul into love, into eternity. That is our end, much in contrast to that of the world: not death, but "into the silence" of Love.

But we are not there yet. It's well and good that we will arrive in the heart of the Blessed Trinity, the Inner Life of God, but what are we to do now? If the world responds to their philosophy of meaningless time through sensual pleasure, then Christians respond by asceticism: "Descend lower, descend only/Into the world of perpetual solitude...Internal darkness, deprivation/And destitution of all property, dessication of the world of sense,/Evacuation of the world of fancy,/Inoperancy of the world of spirit" (179). Asceticism is often relegated to either the romantic or geriatric categories -- something for pious St. Francis's and old women. And yet, in Eliot's work, the only solution to the problem of time for the Christian is to purify himself of all earthly desires, to act as if time, "woven in the weakness of the changing body," really were leading him into the greatest of all joys, and not merely to decay. Man must be a credible theist, as Fr. Dubay wrote in The Fire Within, preferring nothing to God. The "darkness" of human life, the apparent victory of death, is not cause for despair. Rather, the "darkness [purifies] the soul,/emptying the sensual with deprivation,/cleansing affection from the temporal." We can only conquer time by, in a sense, being liberated from the desires and fancies it engenders, while still in time in the body.

And so, our asceticism, our waiting in darkness, does not free us from time in any gnostic sense. We do not hope for a disembodied existence in a non-spatial realm. Rather Christ, who has brought time into heaven in his ascension, will create a new heavens and a new earth, a new body for each of us and a new perfected time to dwell in. In this sense, it is "only through time [that] time is conquered," by living, in a sense, as a sacrament of perfect time to come. Only by the narrow path of asceticism and darkness can we arrive in time perfected, at the "still point" in the Heart of the Trinity in the New Creation. That is our hope and our liberation: not to be conquered by time and death, but to answer the question of time with the hope of the cross.

R. Carruth

**All quotes, unless otherwise specified, are from Collected Poems by T.S. Eliot.

Not So Mysterious Ways: God's Definitive Revelation in Jesus Christ

Recently, I was having a discussion with a group of atheists regarding the existence of God--not on the more general level of the God of the philosophers, but rather the God of Christianity in particular. “Why,” they asked, “if the Christian God exists, are there so many non-believers? Surely, if he wished to make it so, he could make his identity as obvious as the existence of the moon, say by a worldwide public revelation of himself, not in a way that coerced the will, but in a way that made his presence clear to everyone?” Essentially: if God wants everyone to be saved and, in his omnipotence, is able to reveal the truth about salvation to everyone, why doesn’t he simply make the truth so obvious that we have a firm ground on which to accept or reject him?

There are several ways to go about responding to an issue like this. The most simple and obvious is, of course, to say “Why, God did make his existence as obvious as the moon—in fact, the moon itself is positive evidence for the existence of God: all the world is a testimony to his reality!” Which is, of course, true, as St. Paul told us (Romans 1:20ff). But this is rather ineffective to the atheist. Furthermore, while true, it doesn’t really strike to the core of the question of Christianity, in particular, nor does it explain the inconsistency in the beliefs (specifically about salvation) amongst those who already believe in God. So, where are we as Christians to turn?

I’ve always maintained that all of Christian theology can be summed up in two words: Trinity and Incarnation. Interestingly, enough, it is on these exact two points that the atheists most fail to comprehend the nature of Christian revelation. So, let us ask, why doesn’t God give a universal revelation of himself and make it obvious to everyone? The answer: Incarnation. St. John of the Cross in his Ascent of Mount Carmel said:

Wherefore he that would now enquire of God, or seek any vision or revelation, would not only be acting foolishly, but would be committing an offence against God, by not setting his eyes altogether upon Christ, and seeking no new thing or aught beside. And God might answer him after this manner, saying: If I have spoken all things to thee in My Word, Which is My Son, and I have no other word, what answer can I now make to thee, or what can I reveal to thee which is greater than this? Set thine eyes on Him alone, for in Him I have spoken and revealed to thee all things, and in Him thou shalt find yet more than that which thou askest and desirest. For thou askest locutions and revelations, which are the part; but if thou set thine eyes upon Him, thou shalt find the whole; for He is My complete locution and answer, and He is all My vision and all My revelation; so that I have spoken to thee, answered thee, declared to thee and revealed to thee, in giving Him to thee as thy brother, companion and master, as ransom and prize.

So, as Christians, we declare that Christ is the definitive revelation of God and all things are contained in him. There is no need or desire for further revelation because everything rests in the sacred heart of Jesus, the Christ. After all, what more could God possibly reveal about himself than the person of himself, in the flesh, walking amongst us, no longer communicating with mere words, riddles or dreams, but speaking to us face to face, as with friends?

But the atheist is still unsatisfied with the response. They don’t think that Christ is the best possible revelation because the Incarnation does not—in their minds—meet the criteria of being the most direct means of conveying the knowledge of God and salvation to the broadest number of people. That God has come among us in the flesh, they argue, is not as obvious as the existence of the moon. But since God is omnipotent, he could reveal himself to more people with more uniformity and therefore lead more people to salvation. Since God is supposed to desire the salvation of all men, must it not be the case that God does not exist? The answer: the Trinity.

The interior life of God can always tell us something about God’s relationship with the world. Particularly since this specific question raised by the atheists addresses the salvation of mankind, we must touch upon what salvation is from this perspective. In the interior life of the Trinity love is most perfectly manifest, for God is Love. The Father gives himself completely and freely to the Son, the Son returns himself completely to the Father and the bond of giving and receiving one another is the Holy Spirit—one God composed of three persons in an eternal dance of absolutely self-giving, interpenetrating Love. What does this tell us about salvation and the fittingness of the Incarnation as its definitive expression? The saints have always affirmed that the meaning and purpose of the Incarnation was that men might partake of divinization or, as it is called in the East, theosis. As St. Athanasius said, “God became man so that man might become god.” That is, God wishes to bestow on mankind his divine nature and welcome mankind into the interior life of the Trinity.

With that in mind, we see how fundamentally fitting it is that God should reveal himself definitively through the Incarnation. God wants mankind to partake of the divine nature; that is the definition of salvation. Then God himself likewise takes on human nature. God wants to reveal himself to mankind? Well then, God should invite mankind to be co-workers in that with him as in all things. And that is the reality. Why does God reveal himself in the Incarnation and then Ascend to Heaven, leaving the propagation of the saving message of the divine life in the hands of the Church (a sacramental body of both divine and human elements)? Because, given the nature and meaning of salvation, it simply would not be fitting for it to happen in any other fashion. God wants man as active co-participants in all his works—from the creation of new life in the conception of children, to the redemption from sin by way of the sacraments through his priestly ministers, and the proclamation of the Gospel and the world-wide realization of his saving message is part of that cooperation, a duty and a responsibility incumbent upon all Christians.

So, in short, why doesn’t God simply make a great, world-wide revelation of himself directly to every individual that makes his presence as obvious as the moon? He simply loves you too much to leave you out of the work.