| Tensions of oppositions internal to T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets---the "high...low, lyric...prosaic, subjective...objective, visionary...quotidian, religious...skeptical," among others---are problematic and provoke widely divergent interpretive readings. Eliot (post-conversion) believes these oppositions to be "complementary visions of reality," yet readers and critics have ongoing difficulty reconciling them (Edward Lobb, ed., Words in Time, 33). My project addresses what Denis Donoghue calls this "unfinished business" of Four Quartets (Lobb, 19), bringing this irresolution into clarity by providing a set of bi-focal lenses: the kataphatic and the apophatic---the Catholic Church's two divergent prayer traditions of the via positiva and the via negativa.;While critics have examined Eliot's early rejection of William James's pragmatism (positive) and Henri Bergson's mysticism (negative), they fail to fit Eliot's early philosophical interest in finding a "clear conception of what the word human implies" into a generalized pattern within his life's work ("The Relation between Politics and Metaphysics," p. 19, Houghton Library, Harvard University). Applying categories of the kataphatic and the apophatic, I show a clearly discernible trajectory of how Eliot understood and utilized the tension of opposites.;Initially, I develop these terms within their Aristotelian origins, Biblical contexts, the early Church Fathers, the medieval mystics, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, and then in exemplification within Eliot's writings. I work through "Tradition and the Individual Talent," showing the dramatic, transgressive yoking of antinomies as unresolved and forced into a compresence.;I elucidate how---by discovering a negation of The Cloud of Unknowing's mysticism and the pragmatic counsel of Henri Bergson's Laughter---Eliot compresses The Waste Land into its final Aristotelian apophatic form of "not." My claims regarding this classical via negativa of form utilize Brett Bourbon's work showing The Waste Land as "moral test" (Faces of Words ms 90). In Four Quartets, I illustrate how Eliot attempts---through kataphatic imagery, his misunderstood use of false apophatic experiences contrasting with embedded texts of medieval mystics, and the discursive sections bridging the gap between kataphatic and apophatic---to show love (and God as Love) as what resolves the tension of oppositions and shows clearly "what the word human implies.". |
