Journey toward Understanding: T.S. Eliot and the Progress of the “Intelligent Believer”

Abstract

In 1930, in the preface to his essay collection For Lancelot Andrewes, T.S. Eliot declared himself to be “classicist in literature, anglo-catholic in religion, royalist in politics.”¹ The description ignited a firestorm, whose embers still spark paroxysms of dismay, disbelief, and dismissal—and an occasional nod of understanding and, less frequently, of approval. We do not know why, we can at best surmise, about the path, the progress, that brought Eliot from the apparent disillusion and doubt of The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men” to the capacity, assigned to Pascal and his Pensées, to “ fac[e] unflinchingly the demon of doubt which is inseparable from the spirit of belief.”²