The voice of this Calling: the enduring legacy of T.S. Eliot

Modern Age, Fall, 2003 by Clinton A. Brand

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Against the dominance of subjectivism and the rule of "method" in aesthetic and interpretive theory since the Enlightenment, Gadamer argues for the solidly historical character of human knowledge, and he rehabilitates the concept of "prejudice" to help reclaim the resources of authority and tradition as means of creative insight and rational participation: "Understanding is not to be thought of so much as an action of one's subjectivity, but as the placing of oneself within a process of tradition, in which past and present are constantly fused." (22) Gadamer's central concept of the "fusion of horizons," the intersection of past and present, has the character of a conversation with broad ethical implications. As it was for Eliot, tradition for Gadamer is the ground of morality, the basis of education, and the arena of human freedom; and in language it becomes also a mode of our participation in the ground of being.

Though language itself in Gadamer's thought sometimes threatens to usurp the place of divinity, the validity and relevance of linguistically mediated tradition in his account rests on an Augustinian notion of the function of the Logos in human understanding and on the concept of personal application (subtilitas applicandi) inherited from German Pietism. (23) That Eliot applied the lessons of tradition to his own conversion to Christian orthodoxy does not mean that he settled into an easy chair, communing privately with the Word in religious bliss; far from it, he recognized in conversion the beginning of "a long journey afoot," one beset with the constant struggle of wresting meaning from language and tradition. (24) With Gadamer, and with the best of our post-modern avatars of suspicion, Eliot knew that "Words strain,/Crack and sometimes break" and that "History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors." (25)

Tradition comes to us with a variety of multifarious voices: their meaningful orchestration and application to the concerns of the current moment demands openness, tact, judgment, and discrimination. Tradition is not an object that can be mastered by method or controlled by technique, Gadamer insists, but rather presents itself to us as a gift in the form of an interpersonal relationship: "For tradition is a genuine partner in communication, with which we have fellowship as does the 'I' with a 'Thou.'" (26) It is perhaps sadly revelatory that Eliot's poetry rarely dramatizes--and even his plays only intermittently--genuine moments of human intimacy and person-to-person communion; yet his poems are rich in Gadamerian dialogues with tradition, both explicitly and more subtly personified, from the voices of Virgil and Augustine in The Waste Land through the "familiar compound ghost" of Little Gidding, and indeed, his essays consist largely of such conversations. As Gadamer argues and Eliot demonstrates, the ordered apprehension, assimilation, and development of tradition is the work of an ethically informed historical consciousness, situated in time and place, and requires the diligent application of prudence (phronesis), an awareness of human finitude together with an appreciation of the educative value of suffering, and the selfsurrender of creative interaction with art as a form of "play."