Tag Archives: Church of England

Arts, Christianity, Culture, Poetry

TS Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’

ASH WEDNESDAY

Intro: The prayers of Lent are a key guide to Eliot’s obscure sequence of poetry

Sometimes, people read TS Eliot’s sequence of six poems, Ash Wednesday, in the hope of better understanding this first day of Lent in the Western Christian Church. The poem is meditative and pivotal which marks his conversion to Anglicanism, and chronicles a journey from spiritual despair to tentative faith. 

Structured around the Lenten season, the poem moves through themes of repentance, purgation, and the desire for divine, transcendent love amidst the emptiness of modern life.

Knowledge of Ash Wednesday – and the rest of Lent – which falls on February 18 this year, is a prerequisite to understand Eliot’s poetry.

Ash Wednesday is obscure. It begins: “Because I do not hope to turn again.” This is a quotation from Guido Cavalcanti, who died in 1300, a friend of Dante’s. How the reader is meant to know that, I’m not sure.

The words had been translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1861, as: “Because I think not ever to return”, a reference to Cavalcanti’s exile from Tuscany. But Eliot knew that “to turn again” is an aspect of repentance, as the Authorised Version of the Bible in 1611 translated the Greek word metanoia, “change of mind”, found in the New Testament. The Ash Wednesday Epistle, from the prophet Joel, begins: “Turn ye even to me, saith the Lord, with all your heart.”

In St Mark’s Gospel, the first words of Jesus are: “Repent and believe the gospel,” and those are now one of the forms of words to accompany the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday. But in Eliot’s day the Latin formula was: Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris, “Remember man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.” In his poem, Eliot, with his Cavalcanti quotation, picks up both the return to dust and the turning again or repentance.

In Ash Wednesday, Eliot incorporates unsignalled quotations from church prayers. In a letter to Bishop George Bell of Chichester in 1930, Eliot addressed Ash Wednesday’s obscurity: “Most of the people who have written to say that they couldn’t understand it seemed to be uncertain at any point whether I was referring to the Old Testament or to the New; and the reviewers took refuge in the comprehensive word “liturgy”. It appears that almost none of the people who review books have ever read any of these things!”

In Part I of Ash Wednesday Eliot quotes the popular Catholic prayer, the Hail Mary.

In Part II he uses the question “Shall these bones live?” to make reference to the extraordinarily vivid passage in Ezekiel 37, where dry bones are reclothed in flesh and live.

In Part III, on the stairs, he ends with, “Lord, I am not worthy”, a prayer in the Mass before Communion: “Lord, I am not worthy that You should enter under my roof; but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed,” an echo of the Centurion’s words in Matthew 8:8.

In Part IV, “And after this our exile” is taken from a medieval prayer, the Salve Regina, where Mary is asked to “Show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

In Part V, “O my people, what I have I done unto thee” is taken from the Improperia or Reproaches in the Good Friday liturgy, based on the prophet Micah (5:3).

In Part VI, the last line, “And let my cry come unto Thee” is also in the Good Friday liturgy, from Psalm 102 (101 in the Vulgate) – in Latin: Domine, exaudi orationem meam, et clamor meus ad te veniat.

Before that, Eliot puts a line, “Suffer me not to be separated”, which is from the 14th-century prayer Anima Christi (taken up by Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits). The context is: “Within Thy wounds hide me /Suffer me not to be separated from Thee.”

All these would have been very familiar to a practising Roman Catholic, less so to most Anglicans and utterly unfamiliar to the leading critics of the 1930s.

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Britain, Culture, Government, Immigration, Society

A moral victory for the Anglican Church and the Archbishop of Canterbury

MORAL AUTHORITY

Intro: The message from the pulpit is not just for Christmas

THE GUARDIAN’S editorial on Friday, 23 December, was a necessary narrative on the cruel policies being exercised by the UK Government on refugee rights.

One of the Conservative Party’s reliably belligerent MPs, Jonathan Gullis, took exception to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s excoriation of the government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. Mr Gullis discerned a troubling modern tendency to “use the pulpit to preach from”. After a challenging year, the Anglican hierarchy were afforded some light relief with such comments, laughter elsewhere in society no-doubt. The Archbishop, Justin Welby, responded that he appreciated the feedback and looked forward to advice on more appropriate pulpit activity. Lambeth Palace can be forgiven for indulging in some festive humour at Mr Gullis’s expense, as a sobering 2022 draws to a close.

The editorial team rightly point to respect for the late queen’s devout faith which has meant that the Church of England’s established status has never truly been brought into question. In the post-Elizabethan era, however, serious scrutiny now seems inevitable – especially in the context of wider constitutional and House of Lords reform.

That will become a necessary debate for another day. Right now, the presence of the lords spiritual at Westminster has clear benefits. At a time when the government is attempting to sell performative cruelty towards migrants as a form of humanitarian intervention, the Anglican bishops, led by Mr Welby, deserve considerable praise for insisting on telling it how it is.

Earlier this month, the archbishop’s annual debate in the Lords was used by Mr Welby who attacked the “harmful rhetoric” that is allowing asylum seekers to be dehumanised, referring to the inflammatory language of “invasion”, expressed by the home secretary, Suella Braverman. This followed a scathing Easter Sermon at Canterbury Cathedral by Mr Welby in which he denounced the Home Office’s offshoring plans as unworthy of “a country formed by Christian values”.

It is unsurprising, of course, that some Conservative MPs have taken umbrage at the ecclesiastical onslaught, accusing the Church’s clergy of ethical grandstanding. The archbishop was accused by John Redwood of fomenting political discord while offering no solutions. But in his Lord’s speech, the Archbishop of Canterbury explicitly identified the danger of loftily moralising without confronting the complexities that politicians are required to face. The bishops have rightly highlighted the need to expand safe, legal routes and by accelerating the processing of claims. The need to balance generosity and compassion with efficient control of borders has been acknowledged.

Nevertheless, in a certain sense, Mr Gullis’s reference to preaching from pulpits identified something important. The way the Church of England has spoken about refugees has indeed been profoundly moral, in a way that has dangerously eluded the secular political debate. Over the past year – amid arguments about deterrence, logistics, the cost of accommodation and deportations, and the speed of the asylum application process – the humanity of the individuals arriving on our shores has been almost lost to view. The citing of the illegal, indecent squalor at the Manston asylum centre in Kent – and that it should ever have been tolerated – is an indication of where that can lead.

By reminding us that “recognition of human dignity is the first principle which must underpin our asylum policy”, and of the need to “see the faces of those in need and listen to their voices”, Mr Welby’s Lord’s speech highlighted what must be the starting point of all refugee policy. This is not mere naivety, at odds with the real world. It is to ground our engagement with that world on an ethical footing. The Archbishop of Canterbury has performed a valuable public service in pointing that out to a political class that has lost touch with the basics.

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