On T. S. Eliot's "The Hippopotamus"

--"the old miasmal mist": Spiritual Inertia in Modern Society--

HITOSHI SANO

I

Soon after "The Hippopotamus" was published in Little Review in July

1917, T. S. Eliot read this poem under the auspieces ofthe Red Cross to a

select group of people in Mayfair, London. 1 The blasphemous

"Hippopotamus" shocked Sir Edmund Gosse, who was in the chair and

introduced him as a "bard."2 This poem was understood to be an "acid

satire on the Church.,,3 His elegant audience must have been appalled at

the lines comparing the "broad-backed hippopotamus" with the "True

Church." The juxtaposition of the gross animal ascending to heaven and

the Church remaining below in "the old miasmal mist" achieves the

desired satiric effect. The first six stanzas of the poem, to be sure, seem

to satirize the materialism and spiritual apathy of the Church. In

particular, the last line of the sixth stanza, "The Church can sleep and

feed at once," implies that the Church is spiritually apathetic but capable

oflooking after its material interests.4

Let us look at the "blasphemous" aspects in the first six stanzas of

"The Hippopotamus":

The broad-backed hippopotamus Rests on his belly in the mud; Although he seems so firm to us He is merely flesh and blood.

Cl]

2

Flesh and blood is weak and frail, Susceptible to nervous shock; While the True Church can never fail For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo's feeble steps may err In compassing material ends, While the True Church need never stir To gather in its dividends.

The 'potamus can never reach The mango on the mango-tree; But fruits of pomegranate and peach Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo's voice Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd, But every week we hear rejoice The Church, at being one with God.

The hippopotamus's day Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts; God works in a mysterious way -­The Church can sleep and feed at once. 5

According to Eloise Hay, "Eliot seems to have been conscious of striking

out at Christianity more intensely than he wished to be apparent." She

thinks that the parallel between "the true Church" and the "broad­

backed hippopotamus" reveals the absurdity of the doctrine that "flesh

and blood" may err like the hippo, and that the weakness of the

churchmen who must preach the word of God with the invulnerability of

the "rock" of which base is really the mud in which the hippo lives.6

If the satire was really aimed at the traditional religious institution, as

3

had been generally accepted, this poem could be understood within the

context of an oppositional avant-garde literary movement prevalent in

the years during and immediately after the First World War. This

assumption is based on the notion that Eliot is thought to be a

modernist, who insisted that the past should be altered by the present as

much as the present is directed by the past, and who attempted to break

away from established values to present fresh ways of viewing man's

nature and function in modern society, whilst experimenting with form

and style.7

Of course, Eliot experimented with form, but it was not a suitable form

for poets who support the modern movement. He adopted the quatrain of

Theophile Gautier, who emphasized the formal properties of poetic art

and objected to lyrical or declamatory outpouring ofthe poet's soul. When

Gautier says that "[n]othing is more insupportable than the word 'me' ....

We reduce ourselves as far as possible to being only a detached gaze," his

statement reminds us of Eliot's famous phrase, "a continual extinction of

personality."s Along with Pound Eliot studied the quatrain which was

considered "counter-current" going against the "general floppiness" of

vers libre in the hands of Amy Lowell and her groups. The quatrain

which requires craftmanship and discipline from a poet can be regarded

as the classicist's form. Theoretically this form must be closely related to

classicists's ideals.9 In fact, in 1916 in his Oxford University Extension

Lectures, Eliot maintained that "the beginning of the twentieth century

has witnessed a return to the ideals of classicism. He defined these ideals

as "form and restraint in art, discipline and authority in religion,

centralization in government (either as socialism or monarchy.)"

Furthermore, he suggested that a "classicist in art and literature" would

be likely to "adhere ... to the Catholic Church."lo

If we assume that Eliot wrote his first quatrain poem with a

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classicist's attitude both toward literature and religion, we should look at

"The Hippopopamus" from a different angle. Before discussing the

subject of the satire, let us look briefly at Eliot's attitude as a classicist

toward religion.

II

Eliot advocated classicism in his Extension Lectures whereas the early

modernists had challenged traditional values and conventions and

championed the freedom of individual self-expression, seeking for the

possibility of modern art. In Eliot's definition, "[m]odernism is merely a

compromise between the point of view of historical criticism - inherited

from Renan - and orthodoxy."ll He thinks that the proponents of

"modernism, which is a purely intellectual movement," stand midway

between the scepticism of Renan, an intellectual leader of the nineteenth

century, and orthodox Christianity.12

Eliot's view on modernism reflects that of T. E. Hulme whose idea of

classicism fortified what Eliot had already gathered from French

reactionary thinkers like Joseph de Maistre and Charles Maurras and

his mentor, Irving Babbitt. Hulme argues that "[m]odernism entirely

misunderstands the nature of religion"; "[i]t is necessary to realise that

there is an absolute, and not a relative, difference between humanism

(which we can take to be the highest expression of the vital), and the

religious spirit.,,13 He insists that the classical view is "absolutely

identical with the normal religious attitude" which can be summarized in

the dogma of "Original Sin," or the view that "man is by nature bad and

limited.,,14 From this classical viewpoint Hulme criticizes modernism and

objects to the optimistic humanism which "confuses both human and

divine things by not clearly separating them.,,15 He believes that "[w]hen

a sense of the reality of these absolute values is lacking, you get a refusal

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to believe any longer in the radical imperfection of either Man or Nature.

This develops into the belief that life is the source and measure of all

values and the man is fundamentally goOd.,,16 Thus, he denounces

humanism as "the germs of the disease that was bound to come to its full

evil development in Romanticism.,,17

Eliot shares the belief in the limitations of human intellect with

Hulme and condemns the modern intellectual movement which was

menacing traditional civilization based on Catholicism, using the same

term, "the germs": "[t]he germs of all these tendencies are found in

Rousseau," for "Romanticism stands for excess in any direction." Eliot

thinks that "[i]t splits up into two directions; escape from the world of

fact, and devotion to brute fact" and "[t]he two great currents of the

nineteenth century -- vague emotionality and the apotheosis of science

(realism) alike spring from Rousseau.18 When humanists try to place

perfection in humanity, the atempt will end up with the falsification of

the divine. Obviously, the Eliot who was attracted to Hulme's notion of

"Original Sin" supported "orthodoxy" although he fully understood

Renan's scepticism. When he made a critical comment concerning

modernism under the title of "The Return to the Catholic Church" in his

Extension Lectures, he supposedly recognized the importance of the

Church as a bastion of tradition in the same way that Hulme and French

reactionary thinkers did. For the classicists the Church was the

embodiment of accepted and traditional ideas. Therefore, they affirmed

traditional respectability in the Church even if they did not have

religious belief. 19

Eliot's classicist point of view and his concern for religious belief can be

traced not only in the Syllabus but also in his book reviews. In 1916 and

1917 he wrote reviews on a number of books about the relation between

religion and philosophy. His major preoccupation at this period was to

6

distinguish between the orthodox and the heretical view of the nature of

man. He objects to the confusion of the absolute values of religion with

those of human things. In his book review issued in July 1917, Eliot

supports the idea forwarded by the author of Men's Creatrix who "wishes

to demonstrate that philosophy, art, morality, education and politics all

aim at a completion which they never of themselves reach, and that they

find this completion in Christianity."

He does not demonstrate that any form of philosophy leads to Christia nity; he takes a particular type, absolute idealism, and shows that the idealistic absolute is a failure unless it can be identified with a personal Deity .... But to agree with the author we must not only concede that "Intellect and Imagination, Science and Art, would reach their culmination in the apprehension and contemplation of the supreme principle of the universe adequately embodied and incarnate," but this culmination is found in Christianity. 20

In the book review issued in June 1916 on Paul Elmer More's

Aristocracy and Justice, Eliot emphasizes the limitations of man:

Both sides of the contrast -- in art, in philosophy, in politics, in morals -- are the expression of impatience against all restraint, against the unavoidable limitations of life and the necessary limitations of civilization, are expressions of belief in the undisciplined imagination and emotions.21

Although Eliot's formal conversion to Anglo-Catholicism was in 1927,

the critical point of view of his classicism already had a tendency to be

religious and Catholic in 1916. Therefore, he expressed much more

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sympathy with the scepticism of Georges Sorel which was to develop into

"the craving for belief' than with that of Renan which "was still a

satisfYing point of view, almost an esthetic pose.,,22 In his book review

issued in July 1917 on Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence Eliot says:

He [Sorel] is representative of the present generation, sick with its own knowledge of history, with the dissolving outlines of liberal thought, with humanitarianism. He longs for a narrow, intolerant, creative society with sharp divisions. He longs for the pessimistic, classical view. And this longing is healthy.23

Eliot's leaning toward Catholicism manifests itself in his judgement of

the system of values expressed in the books which he reviewed. We can

assume from the critical point of view which penetrates all his book

reviews that his poetry reflects his religious classicism. In fact, in his

first review of A. J. Balfour's Theism and Humanism (1915), he mentions

that "it is truer to say that the type of mind which leans toward one type

of philosophy will manifest its peculiarity in its tastes in art, and its

tastes in morality as well.,,24

III

What the blasphemous statement in "The Hippopotamus" really

means is completely different from the blasphemy of those who

disapprove of Christianity as a whole. Unlike Pound who insisted that

"[o]rganized religions have nearly always done more harm than good,

and they have always constituted a danger,,,25 Eliot showed a keen

interest in Christianity, its dogma and institutions. In 1917 Eliot

comments on orthdox Christianity in his book review of R. G.

Collingwood's Religion and Philosophy: "Philosophy may show, if it can,

8

the meaning of the statement that Jesus was the son of God. But

Christianity - orthodox Christianity - must base itself upon a unique

fact: that Jesus was born of a virgin: a proposition which is either true or

false, its terms having a fixed meaning.,,26 Years later in 1930 Eliot

explained that genuine blasphemy can be "a way of affirming belief.,,27

Therefore, Eliot's blasphememy can be understood as an attack which is

aimed at the Church in an unusual state of spiritual sickness or at the

sickness itself.

The lucrativeness of the spiritual institution is slyly satired when the

Church is compared with the "broad-backed" hippopotamus. But the

satire is also aimed at the hippo of mere flesh and blood entering into

heaven. Before considering what the satire condemns, it is helpful to

discuss what the hippopotamus represents.

Obviously, the hippopotamus is a caricature of human beings as are

expressed in the Bible in the phrase "flesh and blood.,,28 Grover Smith

points out that the hippopotamus represents "the weakness of natural

man.,,29 The hippo "seems so firm" but he "is merely flesh and blood."

Unlike Gautier's hippopotamus which is wrapped in the invulnerable

armour of his conviction, Eliot's hippo is "[s]usceptiable to nervous

shock.,,30 And his steps are so "feeble" that he "may err/ [i]n compassing

material ends," which he "can never reach." Though he appears weak, he

is still procreative and his voice "[b]etrays inflexions hoarse and odd" at

the mating time.

In a sense the hippopotamus is described as the very opposite to the

ideal man for such a humanist as Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his view

human beings are originally without bounds and born into a life directed

toward goodness and perfection and both his body and his mind are

invigorated by habits of conversation with nature even when he is in all

his weakness.31 In other words, the hippo is representative of man in a

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half human state. The phrase "mere flesh and blood" reveals the nature

of the man as seen by classicists. For the epithet "mere" added to "flesh

and blood" implies the vulnerablity of man even if he sometimes appears

firm and sound. The word "broad-backed" suggests the sensual nature of

this half-human representation. This word is used in the later poem,

Ash-Wednesday, to describe an amorous Pan-like figure. And in

"Sweeney Erect" a variant of "broad-backed", "broadbottomed", is used

for Sweeney, an orang-outang-like man.

The hippopotamus does not deserve to entering into heaven, yet he

appears to take wing and ascend from the damp savannas.

I saw the 'potamus take wing Ascending from the damp savannas, And quiring angels round him sing The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the lamb shall wash him clean And him shall heavenly arms enfold, Among the saints he shall be seen Performing on a harp of gold.

Smith explains why the hippo is accepted in heaven, as follows:

The hippopotamus, though perhaps quite cold in faith, has ultimately more favor with God than apathetic Christians who "can sleep and feed at once." The Church, if spiritually asleep, is incapable of good; the hippopotamus is awake at least part of the time, and, though capable of error, he is also capable of reform-­he will even be welcome in heaven.32

His explanation is not convincing at least for religious classicists who

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believe that man with his Oeiginal Sin needs individual and

authoritarian discipline in order to be good and human.33 Besides, Smith

fails to see that the lines depicting the hippo being welcomed in heaven is

a hilarious joke.34 The use of an archaic and elevated style enhances the

humorous effect in expressing the absurdity of the winged hippo

"[p]erfotming on a harp of gold" among the saints.

Let us now turn to another subject of the satire in the last stanza, "the

True Church."

He shall be washed as white as snow, By all the martyr'd virgins kist, While the True Church remains below Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

The satirical usage of "True" insinuates that the "Church" is not

authentic, or in a deteriorated state. The word "remains" suggests that

"the True Church" is not qualified to be accepted into heaven and has to

stay below whereas the hippo shall be. The third line of the stanza just

quoted hints that "the True Church" is not the Church's religious

institution, but the clergy. For it is only man who seeks for his salvation.

Smith and Manju J ain note that the clergy in "The Hippopotamus"

correspond to the Laodiceans who were wavering between Christianity

and Judaism, judging from the epigraph.35 The significance of the

epigraph from St. Paul's Epistle to the Colossians 4, 16 is revealed when

God's damnation of the Laodiceans is remembered. They are castigated

in Revelation 3, 15-18:

I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou

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wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked: ....

Eliot's criticism is not merely against such a "True Church" as the

clergy represent. Another epigraph which was withdrawn from Faber

and Faber edition of Collected Poems 1909-1935 (April 1936) introduces

additional considerations, which force us to attend to the causes of

spiritual inertia. Eliot uses a lengthy Latin epigaraph from St Ignatius's

Epistle to the Trallians:

In like manner, let all reverence the Deacons as Jesus Christ, and the Bishop as the Father, and the Presbyters as the council of God, and the assembl:y of the Apostles. Without these there is no church.36

Orthodox Christianity demands the belief in Jesus as the son of God, and

St Ignatius claimed that Christians should revere the clergy as Jesus

Christ, but the clergy are "lukewarm" and "wretched", St Ignatius's

words gain ironical overtones. When the "lukewarm" Christians forget

that "Christ is the head of the church" (Ephesians 6. 23), "there is no

church" with those clergy. Eliot must be aware of the absence of Christ's

flesh and blood as A. D. Moody points out.37 In Eliot's view, any claims to

worship something human rather than the Divinity should be

condemned.

The poem seems to bring out the contrast between "the hippopotamus"

and "the True Church" into clear relief and at the end they appear to be

further apart than ever -- one in heaven, the other ''Wrapt in the old

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miasmal mist." But does this startling contrast reveal the real difference

in the moral quality of the two targets of mockery, "the hippopotamus"

and "the True Church"? We should notice again that "the hippo" is seen

in a mock heaven, an illusion seen by the narrator. The point to observe

is that the description of "the hippo" taking wing and ascending to

heaven is what "1 saw." Furthermore, the repeated auxiliary "shall"

indicates nonspecific futurity or certainty on the part of the narrator. The

"hippo" and "the True Church" are both "merely flesh and blood." The

"old miasmal mist" wraps'not only "the True Church" but also "the

hippopotamus" "in the mud." This germ-laden gas accelerates the

decaying process of the former and makes the latter forget that "he never

flies away into the circumambient gas" and tread on air into an

imaginary heaven.3s

IV

Eliot realized the value of the Church as the embodiment of discipline,

hierarchy and order, and the necessity of a religious point of view when

he wrote "The Hippopotamus." But he saw intellectual tendencies of the

late nineteenth and early twentieth century menacing that Church and

making it difficult to maintain belief within the Christian scheme.

According to Eliot, these conflicting tendencies can be traced to a

common source, Romanticism. One of these currents leads to humanism

which is based on "the belief in the fundamental goodness of human

nature." Humannism provides a favorable intellectual environment for

those who feel "impatience against all restraint, against the unavoidable

limitations of life and the necessary limitations of civilization" with

"belief in the undisciplined imagination and emotion.,,39 The humanism

placed on human plane the perfection which belonged only to the divine

and became a substitute for religion. Humanists confused both human

13

and divine things by not clearly separating them and then tried to leap

the chasm. The other current leads to intellectualism which manifested

itself in pragmatism, idealism and scientific materialism. Pragmatists

postulate that every judgement is determined by a consciousness of need

in a certain situation. For them man is the measure of all things. The

absolute posited by idealists is ideal rather than real since it exists only

within the inner world of "finite center" of each individual which is

separate and shut from that of others.40 Scientific materialists' attempts

to explain religion either by reducing it to the subject of scientific study

or by forging the falsification of the divine. Eliot objects to Romanticism

because of its anthropocentrism since he thinks that the absolute must

not be something human because the absolute is set above individual

thought and feeling and the flux of phenomena.41 Eliot believes in the

doctrine of the depravity of "mere flesh and blood."

Eliot's criticism of the clergy as representing the "True Church" is

itself a cliche. They are as corrupt in the twentieth century as it was in

the old days. His later criticism of the Church of England after he

converted to Anglo-Catholicism is, in a sense, more intense and

stinging.42 What the satire in "The Hippopotamus" is aimed at is not just

the corruption of the Church, but man's inability to have a normal

religious attitude. When the noxious gas of intellectualism based on

anthropocentrism is widely spread, a sense of the reality of the absolute

in the world of religious values is lost. Those who live below the level of

doubt or belief and are erring in "compassing material ends" are infected

with spiritual inertia, or "the old miasmal mist."

On the surface some readers discern Eliot's satiric technique applied in

the quatrain and enjoy his comic invention in ironical paradox: the

"weak" hippo is ascending into heaven while the self-reghteous Church is

left below on the earth. Yet no critic is justified in regarding "The

14

Hippopotamus" as just a blasphemous satire on the Church or as a poem

written by an anti-religious modernist. Beneath the surface of this poem

Eliot criticizes the intellectual atmosphere causing lukewarmness in

religious zeal. Eliot expresses his attitude as a religious classicist in form

and in idea as well. His awareness of "the germs of all these tendencies"

in modern society is reflected in the expression "the old miasmal mist."

Notes

1 According to Lyndall Gordon, Eliot read his poems before December 1917.

Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years (Oxford: Oxford UP., 1977) 84f.

2 William Turner Levy and Victor Scherle, Affectionately, T. S. Eliot: The

Story of a Friendship, 1947-1965 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1968) 30.

3 Gertrude Patterson, T. S. Eliot: Poems in the Making (Manchester:

Manchester UP., c1971) 118.

4 Interestingly, many years later Eliot realized that the real Church could not

accumulate money easily while it was sleeping: "Since that (."The

Hippopotamus") was written I have come to serve as a church warden and

know the struggle to get money in when it is needed. Ifone lives long enough,

one learns!" Levy and Scherle, 30.

5 T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays ofT. S. Eliot (London: Faber and

Faber, 1969) 49.·

6 Eloise Knapp Hay, T. S. Eliot's Negative Way (Combeidge, Mass.: Harvard

. UP., 1982) 42f.

7 Eliot's contemporaries seem to have regarded him as the leader of the

modernists. Cf. Yvor Winters, "T. S .. Eliot or The Illusion of Reaction," T. S.

Eliot Critical Assessments ed. Graham Clarke, Vol. IV (London: Christopher

Helm, c1990) 96: "When Eliot announced his conversion to Catholicism and

Classicism in 1927, his modernist followers were astonished, and they have

never really forgiven him; .... "

8 Philip E. Tennant, Theophile Gautier (London: University of London,

Althlone Press, 1975), 27. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T. S.

Eliot: Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1932; 3rd enlarged edition

15

1951; reprinted 1986) 17.

9 Eliot answered the question on his idea about the relation between form

and content, as follows: "The form gave the impetus to the content." Writers at

Work: the Paris Review interviews, 2nd series. introduced by Van Wyck Brooks

(Seeker, 1963), 82, qtd. from Erik Svarny, 'The Men of 1914' T. S. Eliot And

Early Modernism (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press,

1988),8I.

10 Eliot, Oxford University Extension Lectures: Syllabus of a Course of Six

Lectures on Modern French Literature, qtd. from A. D. Moody, Thomas

Steams Eliot: Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP., 1979) 44.

11 Eliot, Syllabus, qtd. from Moody, 48.

12 Eliot, Syllabus, qtd. from Moody, 45, 48.

13 T. E. Hulme, "A Notebook," The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed.

Karen Csengeri (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) 425f. In Hulme's view,

modernism does not recognize the chasm between the organic world, dealt

with by biology, psychology and history, and the world of ethical and religious

values. He thinks that "[t]he attempt to explain the absolute of religious and

ethical values in terms of the categories appropriate to the essentially relative

and non-absolute vital zone, leads to the entire misunderstanding of these

values."

14 Hulme, "Romanticism and Classicism," The Collected Writings, 6I.

15 Hulme, "Preface to Sorel's Reflections on Violence," The Collected Writings;

250.

16 Hulme, "Mature Philosophy," The Collected Writings, 444.

17 Hulme, "Political Theory," The Collected Writings, 250.

18 Eliot, Syllabus, qtd. from Moody, 43.

19 Cf. Ernest Renan, La Refome intellectuelle et morale de la

France(Cambridge: Cambridge UP., 1950) 52, qtd. from Kenneth Asher, T. S.

Eliot and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge UP., 1995) 17: "One may be a

royalist without accepting divine right, just as one may be a Catholic without

believing in the infallibility of the Pope, Christian without believing in the

supernatural and divinity of Jesus Christ." Cf. Charles Maurras, Trois idees

politique (Paris: Librairie ancienne, 1912) 60, qtd. from Asher, 24: "The merit

16

and honor of Catholicism was to organize the idea of God and to remove from

it this venom."

20 Eliot; [A review of] Religion and Philosophy, by R. G. Collingwood,

International Journal of Ethics, XXVII, no. 4 (July 1917) 542.

21 Eliot, «An American Critic," The New Statesman, VII, no. 168 (June 24,

1916) 284.

22 Eliot, [a view of] Reflections on Violence, by Georges Sorel, Translated and

with an introduction and bibliography, by T. E. Hulme. Monist, 27, no. 3 (July

1917),478-9.

23 Eliot, Monist, 27, 478-9.

24 Eliot, [A review of] Theism and Humanism, by A. J. Balfour, International

Journal of Ethics, XXVI, no. 2 (Jan. 1916), 285.

25 Ezra Pound, Editorial, Little Review (May 1917).

26 International Journal of Ethics, 27, no. 4 (July 1917) 543.

27 Eliot, "Baudelaire," Selected Essays, 421. Cf. Eliot, After Strange Gods

(London: Faber and Faber, 1933) 56f.

28 Cf. Galatians 1. 16, Matthew 16. 17.

29 Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and

Meanings (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956; 2nd edition 1974)

39.

30 Theophile Gautier, Poesie completes, 3 vols., ed. Rene Jarinski (Paris, Nizet,

1970), Vol. 11, 207:

Je suis comme l'hippopotame:

De ma conviction couvert,

Forte armure que rien n'entame,

Je vais sans peur par le desert.

31 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.

Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library, c1940) 68.

32 Smith, 39f.

33 Eliot, "An American Critic," 284. Cf. Hulme, The Collected Writings, 444.

34 Interestingly, Eliot uses the phrase "ascending into heaven" when he

17

criticizes idealists who apply the dialectical method to the problem of absolute

truth. Eliot, [Ethics], type script p. 2: a paper for courses in philosophy, bMS

Am 1691. 14 (32), possessed in The T. S. Eliot Collection, Houghton Library,

Harvard, qtd. from Manju Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The

Haruard Years (Cambridge: Cambridge UP., 1992) 85.

35 Smith, 39. Jain, A Critical Reading of the Selected Poems ofT. S. Eliot (Oxford:

Oxford UP., c1991), 110.

36 St. Ignatius (c35-c107) warns the recipients of his letter against a Judaizing

heresy with Docetic elements, and maintains that the best safeguard for the

unity of the Christian faith is the bishop, who is pre-eminent because he is "as

the Lord," and without whose authority neither the Eucharist nor Marriage

may be celebrated. Cf. M. P. Brown, The Authentic Writings of Ignatius

(Durham, N. C., 1963). The English translation is quoted from Hay, 41.

37 Moody, 63.

38 Hulme, "Romanticism and Classicism," The Collected Writings, 62.

39 Eliot, "An American Critic," 284. Eliot in later years maintains that the

modern movement leads humanity further in "the pursuit of the mirage of

Earthly Paradise --the illusion that we can be made happy and perfect by

the appliciation of legistlation or force of the results of scientific discovery."

"The Search for Moral Sanction," The Listener, VII, 168 (March 30, 1932) 446.

40 Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley

(London: Faber and Faber, 1964) 169.

41 Eliot, Knowledge and Experience, 169.

40 Eliot criticizes the Church of England corrupted by the "deadening

influences": "One of the most deadening influences upon the Church in the

past, ever since the eighteenth century, was its acceptance, by the upper,

upper-middle and aspiring classes, as a political necessity and as a

requirement of respectability." Eliot, "Thoughts Mter Lambeth," Selected

Essays, 368.