A Philosophy that Sings After the Death of God

TS Eliots Via Negativa

Juan Manuel Escamilla Gonzlez Aragn

PhD in Philosophy
Extended Research Proposal
juanmescamilla@me.com

Hypothesis

Reading TS Eliots poetry as an instance of Dionysius the Areopagites

hermeneutical circle, we may understand Eliots mystical understanding of the
death of God, which allow us in spite of that, to call this Friday good (Eliot, FQ,
EC, IV, 1963: 188): a type of religious turn which is not exempt of a serious
philosophical exam, but which found its way out of the dark night of the soul of
Modernity by turning its death ends into stepping stones to admit the possibility of
mystic experience. Paradoxically, the peculiar brand of Western disbelief of
Ontotheology may be specially fit, perhaps, for a philosophical turn leading to the
re-discovery of reality as a cosmic liturgy.

Eliot and Philosophy

Philosophy is difficult unless we
discipline our minds for it; the full
appreciation of poetry is difficult for those
who have not trained their sensibility by
years of attentive reading. But devotional
reading is the most difficult of all,
because it requires an application, not
only of the mind, not only of the
sensibility, but the whole being.
T.S. Eliot

It has been often said that Dantes Comedy springs from Aquinas Summa. But, is
it possible that, five centuries later, and after the death of God, the highest poetic
production of the Twentieth Century still springs from Aquinas legacy? I will argue
that Eliots poetical treatment of the death of God inherits, via St. John of The
Cross mystical poetry, Thomas Aquinas deep influence of Dionysius the
Areopagite.
The relevance of T.S. Eliots works to Philosophy has been evident to
scholarly tradition and his fame as a metaphysical poet and philosophical critic of
Literature is fair, for Eliot studied Philosophy in some of the best universities of the
English-speaking world (2016: 180) and became close, for instance, to Russell,

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amongst other notable scholars. He even wrote a dissertation for a PhD at Harvard
on a Hegelian influenced English philosopher, Francis Herbert Bradley: Knowledge
and Experience in the Philosophy of FH Bradley (1964).
Among those who defend that the influence of Bradley is not superficial in
Eliots career as a writer is Freed, who explains but that some poems are a critique
to his system (1979: 44). Both Freed (1979) and Bolgan (1960) pointed out the
influence of Bradleys knowledge theory on Eliots writing. This argument is better
explain by Bolgan:

[E]very major critical concept which appears in Mr. Eliots literary criticism
many of which initiated such stubborn controversies emerges from his
radical absorption and criticism of Bradleys philosophy, [] these notions
and concepts originate in Bradley, are digested and recorded by Eliot as he
writes his own PhD dissertation between 1914 and 1916 and reappear
beginning a year or two later, now in new, full, literary dress in Mr. Eliot
reviews and essays (1960: 257).

Hawthorn (2005) punctually showed the Hegelian influence of TS Eliots

prose and even pointed out a series of his readings on Hegel: he was familiar with
Hegels Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Natural Law, Lectures on the
History of Philosophy, The German Constitution and Philosophy of Right. He
singled out several places where Eliots claims meet Hegels. Although Hawthorn
notices the influence of Philosophy in Eliots poetry, he mainly traces his more
obviously philosophical prosaic writing, and he mostly deals with his early essays
on philosophy and his dissertation and some of his late, prosaic work.
Hawthorn too casts out the passages of his early philosophical work and on his
work as literary critic, which is the stress of most works on Eliots Philosophy and
where its influence is more evident. Hawthorn also points at some other clear
references of Eliots later prose, like For Lancelot Andrewes or The Idea of a
Christian Society, written by Eliot at the same time than The Four Quartets and
Murder at the Cathedral.
Constant references to the influence of Philosophy in his poetry and of his
poetry in Philosophy are still being argued today (Glaser, 2005; Moody, 1995;
Chinitz, 2009; Maleki, 2011a, 2011b; Muzina, ; Shusterman, 1988; Redmond, in
preparation) almost a hundred years after the publication of The Waste Land, even
if the approach to Eliots poetry has been faced, mostly, from the perspective of
Literature.
The topics upon which his attention was drawn at his youth became the
central topics of his former critical, philosophical and poetical efforts. He was a
keen seeker of the meaning of life, a quest which took him far away to foreign
wisdoms and to inquire ancient traditions coming from the past (Hughes, 2011;
Lanzano, 2001-2002; Maleki, et al, 2011a, 2011b; Pani, 2013; Redmond, in
preparation; Chinitz, 2009).
In order to understand the meaning of his present and foresee the future
something he eventually did for a living, at a bank, but furthermore, to give

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meaning to his own life, he had to face in first person, with utmost honesty and
rational rigor, the most delicate problems of Modern Philosophy:

In his attempts to make sense of his experience and the world, the young Eliot
frequently revisits certain difficulties in his notebook: (1) the problem of the
selfs relationship to the Absolute, which in Eliots case includes a nascent
spiritual awareness; (2) the problem of solipsism, or how the internal self
relates to external realities, especially realities that are sordid or at odds with
conventional feelings; and (3) the problem of the sexual impulse and how to
negotiate between its insistent claims and socially proper modes of expression
and behavior. Eliots mature poetry would find compelling solutions to these
problems, but it is in the notebook that the poet first maps out their terrain
(Stayer, J, 2009: 111).

First, we should deal with the second matter listed above and then we will be in
position to face the first and the third issues. Eliots PhD dissertation devoted in a
meaningful discussion of Decarts solipsism (Materer at Moody, 1995: 51; Glaser,
2005) and its influence in Modern philosophy. He dealt with Bradleys account of
knowledge, which Eliot frames as a conclusion of his Metaphysics, to find his own
way through the problems.

A way out of solipsism

What are the roots that clutch, what branches

grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no
relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Eliot, WL, BD: verses 18-30; 38-39

Empiricism and Rationalism may be understood as alternative routes to argue a

way back to reality, as strategies to close the gap, opened by Descartes dualism,

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between a realm of thought and a realm of matter, which resulted in the divorce of
sensible experience and interpretation. Eliot was fiercely pierced by the acute
tension between the stress of Idealism and that of Empiricism, although his interest
in the Idealist tradition were more noticeable.
According to Spears Brooker, Eliot began finding his way into that tension
already in his schooldays essay The Interpretation of the Primitive Ritual, while
discussing the possibility of a science of religion before the problem of how
much was our compared religion a description and how much an
interpretation; he, as Kierkegaard at Fear and Trembling (2006), rejected the
whole idea of a religious progress, for if there may well be a technical evolution of
tools, that has never spared any generation from accomplishing their own moral
and religious progress or else, their decadence. Besides, it is perfectly possible
to think of an action reenacted by successive generations for whom it could have
meant something different (Spears Brooker, at Harding, 2016: 180- 183).
Eliot first encountered Bradleys thought at 1913, during a seminar on Kant.
Spears Brooker tell us that Eliot praised Kant, back then, for understanding that
dualism is inherent to the human condition (Spears Brooker at Harding, 2016:
181), but that he was ultimately seduced by Bradleys search to unify experience
beyond the misleading subject-object approach of Modern Philosophy from
Descartes onwards, even if he rejected Bradleys (and Hegels) last tendency
towards Idealism.
This synthesis of intellectual and sensible knowledge had been intended by
Kant, although the result of his solution was the radical impossibility of thinking the
central topics of classic Philosophy (God, freedom of human soul and world) and a
deepening of the dualism that now stated reality as the best hypothesis to explain
sensible experience.
While Bradleys philosophy reenacts the Hegelian dialectic between ideality
and factuality in the becoming of the Spirit, this idea is inherited by Eliots poetry
and critic of literature. He criticized Bergson from this standpoint. Even if he thinks
his account is quite complete, he partially takes the side of Leibnizs theory of
matter, which is in some ways the subtlest that has ever been devised and he
compares it with Bergsons theory, which he describes as consciousness running
down (quoted by Le Brun, 1967). Not rarely, then, many have claimed that it is
Bradleys theory the one to be found in Eliots works, chiefly on his critic of
Literature.
Hegel closed that gap by unifying thought and world, rational and real, hence
getting rid of materialism and material world all at once, but leaving the world as
flat as a creation, argued Bradley; he would, then, try to reconcile the world of
nature and the world of ideas, a goal not far from that of Eliot, for he noticed,
already in his school years, reading Kant, he solved some problems of Descartes
dualism, but left us with new problems:

He counters Cartesian dualism (mind/world; subject/object), but in the process,

he introduces Kantian dualism (phenomena/noumena). As expressed in a
passage Eliot underlined in the introduction to his edition of Kant, however far

4
 we may carry our investigations into the world of sense, we never can come
into contact with aught but appearances. For Descartes, then, the object does
not exist; for Kant, it exists but is unknowable. Descartes dissolves the outside
world; Kant puts it beyond reach (Spears Brother at Chinitz, 2009: 58).

Bradleys solution is clever, as it stands beyond the distinction between subject

and object, while entangling them both in a wider process: There is but one reality
and its being consist in Experience. In this one whole all appearances come
together (Bradley quoted by Spears Brooker at Harding, 2016: 183). His account
of experience, heavily Hegelian, is threefold, in relation to time:

whereas immediate experience is characterized by a knowing and feeling that

comes before thinking, transcendent experience is characterized by a thinking
and feeling that comes after and is achieved through thought (Spears Brooker
at Chinitz, 2009: 60).

Even if Eliot came to share a great deal of Bradleys Hegelian thought, he also
stressed how Kant and Hegel, before Bradley, had failed in reconciling perception
and reality and how Bradley was, in his account, thoroughly empirical as
consequence of his attempt to reconcile natural world and that of ideas (Eliot,
quoted by Spears Brooker at Chinitz, 2009: 60). This is a claim that I believe to be
unfair for, in my view, Hegel and Kant do try to reconcile the senses data with
intellectual knowledge. Hegels stress, nevertheless, is that, at the end of the day,
our concepts do unify our sensible experience, otherwise as Kant already stated,
chaotic. I even believe that even if Kant was unable to close the gap between
theoretical knowledge and practical reason, he understood them as distinct ways of
judging, but even then, part of a more sophisticated experience of the world. He did
not abandon or cancel the ultimate search of Metaphysics. He just took it from its
traditional place (at his first Critic, 1781), as an object of knowledge and replaced it
elsewhere, in the realm of practical reason (1788) and he even develops a moral
argument to prove Gods existence at his third Critic (1790).
Anyway, to stress how Bradleys account was broader than Hegels, Eliot
quoted The Principles of Logic (1912) in his dissertation, in order to show how
Bradley had managed to understand Hegels synthesis of experience with a stress
he missed in the account for sensible experience:

It may come from a failure in my metaphysics, or from a weakness of the flesh

which continues to blind me, but the notion that existence could be the same
as understanding strikes as cold and ghost-like as the dreariest materialism...
Our principles may be true, but they are not reality. They no more make that
Whole which commands our devotion than some shredded dissection of
human tatters is that warm and breathing beauty of flesh which our hearts
found delightful (quoted by Spears Brooker at Chinitz, 2009: 60).

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 Bradley sustained that if an idea is self-contradictory, it degrades mere
appearances leading to reality of being, obligatory, consistent and harmonious: the
result of a genre of experience that must be comprehensive to all, that means:
universal, transcending the plurality of independent realities, since they depend on
the same total whole. This does not mean that reality banishes away, but rather the
gain of a certain point of view which allows, if not to know reality itself, to look at it
in a different way from that of mere theory. On the contrary, it is considered as a
feature or an aspect of the unity. This is a continuation of Hegels Absolut as the
totality of the existing beings in the dialectic of the Spirit (2001).
Christina Hauck follows Cleo McNelly Kerns on the Buddhist influence of Eliot,
in some cases direct, but, indirectly, through both Bradleys seek for transcendence
as for the seemingly impossible enterprise to transcend the self, which has been
argued in the similarity of his thought to common Buddhist knowledge exposed in
Narjunas analysis:

His dialectic begins with immediate experience, which is not simply a

primitive state but a continuing dimension of life. In opposition to this arises a
sense of subject and object, a state whose transcendence lies in the
perception of the Absolute.
But the Absolute turns out to be nothing more than the finite center of
immediate experience, and hence the subject is trapped in a never-ending
solipsistic circle (Kearns 122-23). In brief, Bradley does not so much deny the
self as invest the self with the power to transcend the self, a hopeless task (at
Chinitz, 2009: 42).

Eliot accepts this position, even if he remarks that the first and the third
moment of this experience are hypothetical, but necessary to postulate, as long as
experience takes place in time.
Truth does not happen somewhere between the subject and the object, as
Bergson claimed, nor it consisted in the reduction of either form of knowledge to
another. For young Eliot, each of our lived truths are partial and fragmentary
(Materer, at Moody, 1995: 51). Besides, the distinction between subject and object
is misleading for it fails to understand that both subject and object take their place
in a given context and time. Materer writes on Eliots PhDs argument:

His work on the dissertation influenced Eliot's criticism by developing in him a

habit of skeptical inquiry into ideas and by teaching him Bradley's scrupulous
respect for words. Words such as "sensation," "feeling," "emotion," and "fact,"
which are essential to Eliot's analysis of how we perceive reality, are
scrupulously and subtly employed in the dissertation. Eliot rejects the naive
realism that says the world is simply there before us, insisting that our ideas
and feelings condition even our most direct sensations of the world. Similarly, a
"fact" is not something that is simply there before our consciousness. Eliot
argued that each fact had a pre-arranged place in a system which gives it its
status as a fact (Materer at Moody, 1995: 50).

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 Past is not something that is left frozen, but it continues to be present and to
drive the future, as he wrote in Four Quartets (published between 1935-1942):

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past (BN, I, 1963: 175).

He now understood the value of the path he had followed through rigorous
examination: it left him barehanded, with nothing; the nymphs are departed (Eliot,
WL, FS: verse 179, p. 60). Anyway, the conclusion of his dissertation would be
later summarized in a later poem: We had the experience but missed the
meaning (FQ, DS, II, 1968: 194).
After finishing writing his dissertation, he expressed his disappointment in
several letters to his family. For Eliot, then: all philosophizing is a perversion of
reality: for no philosophical theory makes any difference to practice It
invariably involves cramming both feet into one shoe (Eliot, quoted by Spears
Brooker at Harding, 2016: 184). After seeking for a firm certainty in knowledge, he
was left in the verge of relativism, first: Son of man,/ You cannot ssay, or guess,
for you know only/ A heap of broken images (Eliot, WL, BD, I: verses: 20-23, pp:
38-39).
His findings convinced him that Philosophy was more engaged with words than
it was with reality; it was, at best, bad poetry of which we do not know if our elders
deceived us/ Or deceived themselves (Eliot: FQ, EC, II: 184):

That was a way of putting itnot very satisfactory:

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With wods an meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected (Eliot: FQ, EC, II: 184)

Philosophy was, for him, nothing more than words on other words. But, more
importantly, the kind of Philosophy he was drawn upon dealt with feelings in a
certain, imprecise, way which is incapable of dealing with the complexity and lack
of unity of human experience, and, then, of speaking of things as hope and the
vision of intelligibility. He would turn into writing Poetry and Critic of Literature. If he
was going to deal with words, he might as well make the most out of them,

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion (FQ, EC, V: 189).

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 The conclusion of a first attempt to know God of Eliot was that which
Modern Philosophy already argued: He who was living is now death/ We, who
were living, are now dying/ With a little patience (Eliot, WL, V, 2001: verses 327-
333, 47). It was a death end faced by Philosophy ever since Descartes
engagement in the problem of solipsism: a questioning purely intellectual self,
unable to determinate what reality may be, ultimately:

At best, only a limited value

In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the patter is new at every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only deceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm (Eliot: FQ, EC, II: 185).

Eliots account of Philosophy is that it is deceiving. But, instead of adopting a

skeptical or a cynical attitude towards knowledge, he would come to conclude that
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/ Is the wisdom of humility: humility is
enless (Eliot: FQ, EC, II, 2001: 185).

Une morale par provision

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire

Eliot, FQ, LG, IV: 207.

In such a position, in the verge of nihilism and skepticism, unable to reach things
themselves, Descartes noticed that from such a viewpoint one had to be careful
not to become mad or, worse, evil, while trying to find a perfect certainty. In doing

8
so, he automatically makes it part of the method to worry for everyday life, which is,
then, the ultimate reason to worry for a method, in the first place. Therefore, in the
third part of the Discourse on the Method, he proposed une morale par provision
(AT VI 227/CSM I 122-4). Of course, these are, as Eliot puts it, hints followed by
guesses (FQ, DS, V: 198), but not just any hints or any guesses.
Our philosophical tradition has misinterpreted Descartes position and that is
why his expression has been, wrongly, translated as a provisional moral code,
following the spirit of Luthers leap of faith (Cern, 2017; Moreno Romo, 2011: 28,
n.12; Rodis-Lewis, 1995: 288). Moreno Romo and ngeles Cern, following Rodis-
Lewis, claim that a better translation, closer to the meaning of Descartes proposal
is to adopt the expression ethics of provision that would point towards Ethics as a
a nurturing providence, a sort of philosophical faith. A faith, then, not exempt from
a philosophical examination of our chances to know the truth and aware of the
limits imposed by the boundaries of natural reason. A philosophical faith capable of
dealing with reality as a gift given to us for us to deal with it in a practical manner.
It is not despite of Philosophy, but thanks to Philosophy that the limited intellect
of finite persons in the frame of finite lives may be able to acknowledge that which
is often overseen in the disciplined examination taken thoroughly into completion of
argumentation: the fact that, already as an attempt to get to very bottom of things,
to the essence of things themselves, from a merely natural perspective, Philosophy
seeks for an account which is not able to deliver entirely; not at least from a pure
exam of the validity of our beliefs. And that is fine, I would add, for reason alone is
but one of the capabilities of persons. Besides, it reenacts the meaning of the world
philosopher as, precisely, some who is not wise, but desires to become and
therefore is not a sophist. In that fashion, Modern philosophy reflects a deeply
Socratic reflection upon our pretended wisdom, one which leaves us, besides,
almost barehanded. Socratic maieutic is, as Nietzsche well observed, some kind of
a hammer of certainties.
When accomplished in a proper rigorous and scientific manner, valid
Metaphysics becomes the analysis of the conditions of possibility of a mere
catalogue of our knowledge. It leaves us with the Encyclopedia, as Hegel already
emphasized by attempting to write one. But that does not mean that, because we
are not able to know God, the soul or freewill in the way we are able to know what
a dark hole, gravity, a carrot or even the impossible bold king of (republican)
France may be, the first series of topics never lost its relevance. Maybe, its time
for Philosophy to measure itself not only with regular statements of knowledge, but
with the kind of knowledge we may find in Poetry, as Plato did by not only
discussing with his fellow colleges and enemies, but against Homer, the very
founder of what came to be Greece.
Actually, the conquest of Philosophy became a certain reverence to God, the
soul and freewill, one very self-aware of the fact that they seem to deal with the
most common reality, available to any commoner, but they also seem to be
irreducible to the natural account of theoretical reasoning.
The distinct realms where judgements acquire a complete and meaningful
meaning are their theoretical disciplines. Judgements of knowledge are perfectly

9
discernible from those on the moral value of what we are told by that knowledge
about reality, which we are, furthermore, able to distinguish from aesthetic values.
Any of these forms of judgment gives us the whole picture alone. The very same
reality, anyway, is being judged by these three different approaches. And it is only
at the conclusion of an attempt to understand the inner relation between these
different valid accounts that we are able to try and make sense of reality.
For Descartes, this was the place to turn into religion. He himself was already a
religious believer before he developed his Philosophical method or encountered
with certain mathematical truths, so he did not have to convert but conceive, more
than a continuity between reality and Revelation, a revelation of reality in
Revelation. In that matter, he preserved the order of disciplines of a scholastic
such as Aquinas. Kant and Hegel did not follow Descartes convictions in the same
fashion, they certainly became engaged in the discussion.
I will argue, following Kant, that the continuity of the Realm of Ends and the
Realm of Nature in the way that they seem to be ordered, structured and
objective, and the drive of reason towards unity, demand us to postulate both
realms as systems of ends. If the arguments to prove Gods existence from a
cosmological point of view had lost all their credit, the moral realm offered to Kant a
possible new way to reformulate Aristotles arguments at the end of the
Metaphysics by trying to think it now in relation to practical reason. The experiment
resulted in a moral prove of Gods existence which is not abhorrent to reason.
Kant, here, reflects upon these matters in the way Aquinas did, at least
partially. For Aquinas, there is a continuity from that which, after much seeking
throughout a long time and, always, subject to error, we are capable of knowing
about the world a hint of broken images and that very same world, but seen
from the perspective of Revealed Theology With the drawing of this Love and the
voice of this Calling (Eliot, FQ, LG, V, 1963: 208) and, chiefly, from that of living
faith,1 of the whole lot. Hence, there would be a continuity from Metaphysics peak
to the lowest ladders of revealed theology. He called that shared soil of
Philosophical and Revealed Theology, praembula fidei (Aquinas, S.Th.I, q.2, ad.1).
Kant and Hegel, nevertheless, looked at this step with utter care and decided
to follow Platos account of the dignity of disciplines, leaving, in the Republic, the
judgement on matters of theology not to poets but to philosophers. Kant, then,
imagined a (tasteless) rational religion. Its contents are those of ethics, precisely,
modeled by the categorical imperative, which is a rational argumentation of human
dignity, but it also deals with Gods existence as a postulate of pure practical
reason (KpV, V). It is in perfect continuity with the Christian tradition, which claimed
that all humans share the same dignity: that of being sons and daughters of God.

1
The contemporary movement of Radical Orthodoxy (1999), from a theological standpoint, here
comes to argue for the whole lot as a consequence to the Encarnation: Doctrine, Liturgy and
popular expressions of piety, Morals, social visibility and action; even Hierarchy and the parish: the
whole institution not in a dogmatic way, but in a way capable of discerning idolatry from true
religion. Earlier, the Philosophy of Liberation in Latin America has often argued in the same fashion,
at least, for instance, in the works by John Sobrino and in the early works of Dussel (Zielinzki, 2017:
in preparation).

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He does not go so far as to say that the reason of our dignity lays in our being
Gods family, of course his hands are tied by Philosophy, in that matter. But
Philosophy can certainly determine that this Christian teaching is coherent with the
rational representation we are able to account for in the world; he argues,
nevertheless, that human dignity lies in rationality, one of the properties attributed
both to God and to creatures:

Se atribuyen a Dios diversas propiedades cuya cualidad se encuentra tambin

adecuada a las criaturas, con la sola particularidad de que en el primer caso
se encuentran elevadas al grado mximo, por ejemplo, el poder, la sabidura,
la presencia, la bondad, etc., con las denominaciones de omnipotencia,
omnisciencia, ubicuidad, bondad infinita, etc., hay empero tres que se
atribuyen exclusivamente a Dios y sin ningn aditamento de magnitud, y las
tres son morales: l es el nico santo, el nico bienaventurado, el nico sabio,
porque estos conceptos encierran ya la ausencia de restricciones. Segn su
orden, l es pues tambin el santo legislador (y creador), el gobernante
bondadoso (y conservador) y el juez justo: tres propiedades que encierran
todo cuanto convierte a Dios en objeto de la religin, y de acuerdo con ellas se
incorporan de suyo en la razn las perfecciones metafsicas (Kant, KpV, V:
footnote 24).

For Kant, then, the conclusion of Philosophy is rational, philosophical, religion.

I see Hegel as a philotheologian who is very aware of Kants system but who is
also trying to preserve Platos primacy of Philosophy in matters of Philosophical
Theology. Therefore, his account of knowledge, as stated in the Phenomenology of
the Spirit, tries to bring back to theoretical Metaphysics those three main topics
Kant, as Pascal, treated as bets of practical reason. But he does so unconvincingly
stressing the spiritual, even if his religious drive is more passionate than Kants and
he seems more cultivated and creative than Kants often dull style let us see of
Kants own taste.

God is death. Modern accounts of Aesthetics and God

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come

upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. ()
I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope,
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
Wait without love, for love would be love of the
wrong thing; there is yet faith,
But the faith and the love are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for
thought:

11
 So the darkness shall be the light, and the
stillness the dancing.

Eliot, FQ, EC, III, 1969: 186

Surprisingly, Kants (also tasteless) Aesthetics, nevertheless, opened a new gate

to the exploration. He noticed, in his Critic of Judgement, that no matter how bad a
man may be, he always may encounter the moral order; and no matter how
uncreative a man could be, he could always understand Newtons laws, if properly
explained, even if they seem a rather rare discovery of science. Today, any kid at
school knows their Physics better than Newton, for they know about relativity and
many other things and they would never try to state how many generations of
humanity appear in the Scriptures in ortder to determine the age of Earth, an
inquiry that occupies more pages of Newtons Opera than the three elegant
statements we still hold. But genius seem to not just find something which is
already there as gravity or that which would account for a morally good action.
According to Kant, the genius is the talent (natural gift) capable of giving rules to
Art. Genius is a creator of rules! (Cr.U. XLVI). Ultimately, he is, also surprisingly,
admitting that he does not know the source from which Art springs. His Aesthetics
is able to judge those creations, but, in the end, the source of genius remains
unexplained.
Hegels Aesthetics are, in that point, better prepared to cope with the richness
and peculiarity of Art and, more importantly, on its contents. Art is capable of
incarnating concepts by dealing with images. Therefore, it is capable of displaying
before us a representation of divinity that allow us to deal, through mediations, with
the experience of that towards what Art is pointing, therefore, allowing us to
experience that which is beyond our senses. In the section under the title of The
Revealed Religion of The Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel writes:

748. Through the religion of Art, Spirit has advanced from the form of
Substance to assume that of Subject, for it produces its outer shape, thus
making explicit in it the act, or the selfconsciousness, that merely vanishes in
the awful Substance, and does not apprehend its own self in its trust. This
incarnation of the divine Being starts from the statue which wears only the
outer shape of the Self, the inwardness, the Selfs activity, falling outside of it.
But in the Cult the two sides have become one; and in the outcome of the
religion of Art this unity, in its consummation, has even gone right over at the
same time to the extreme of the Self. In Spirit that is completely certain of itself
in the individuality of consciousness, all essentiality is submerged. The
proposition that expresses this levity runs: The Self is absolute Being. The
essence, the Substance, for which the Self was [only] an accident, has sunk to
the level of a predicate; and in this self-consciousness over against which there
is nothing in the form of essence, Spirit has lost its consciousness (1977:
paragraph 748, 453).

12
 For Hegel, there is also a continuity of our different ways to perceive a
phenomenon and, even if Art can represent God, it is not a positive representation
of his essence, but, rather, a form of abstraction that leads to emptiness and
ultimate abstraction of the Self:

750. The religion of Art belongs to the ethical Spirit which we earlier saw perish
in the condition of right or law, i.e. in the proposition: 'The Self as such, the
abstract person, is absolute Being'. In the ethical life, the Self is submerged in
the Spirit of its people, it is the universality that is filled. But simple individuality
raises itself out of this content, and its levity refines it into a 'person', into the
abstract universality of right or law. In this, the reality of the ethical Spirit is lost,
and having lost all content, the Spirits of national individuals are gathered into
a single pantheon, not into a pantheon of picture-thought whose powerless
form lets each Spirit go its own way, but into the pantheon of abstract
universality, of pure thought, which disembodies them and imparts to the
spiritless Self, to the individual person, a being that is in and for itself (Hegel,
1977: paragraph 750, 454).

This is the point of solipsism, for Hegel. The universality of the abstraction
leaves the consciousness in its essence, emptied of contents, and existence, a
unfulfilled abstraction (Hegel, 1977: paragraph 750). Thought itself, without
actuality is the certainty we are left with. The only way out of Skeptical
consciousness, then, is the Stoic independence of thought finding its realization
in what he called Unhappy Self-consciousness, the key to understand Hegels
death of God:

752. This self-consciousness knows what the validity of the abstract person
amounts to in reality and equally in pure thought. It knows that such validity is
rather a complete loss; it is itself this conscious loss of itself and the alienation
of its knowledge about itself. We see that this Unhappy Consciousness
constitutes the counterpart and the completion of the comic consciousness that
is perfectly happy within itself. Into the latter, all divine being returns, or it is the
complete alienation of substance. The Unhappy Consciousness, on the other
hand, is, conversely, the tragic fate of the certainty of self that aims to be
absolute.
It is the consciousness of the loss of all the essential being in this
certainty of itself, and of the loss even of this knowledge about itself the loss
of substance as well as of the Self, it is the grief which expresses itself in the
hard saying that "God is death" (1977: paragraph 752, 454-455).

Hegel deals with this statement in the traditional way in which the Gospel tells
us that Jesus was God and that Jesus was killed; he also acknowledges it as a
traditional element of Christian economy of salvation (von der Luft, 1984: 265). But,

13
for Hegel, the last word is neither Revealed Theology nor Religion, but Philosophy.
It offers the rational ground to a final synthesis.
Nietzsche was a reader of Hegel and it has already been sufficiently
stablished. This is one of the sources for his account on the death of God. The
intellectual operation of most interpreters of Nietzsche, I believe, does not take his
poetical philosophy seriously and sees in him as the madman he himself portrayed
in the passage 125 of the Joyous Science. Their understanding of Nietzsche is that
of the nave positivists to whom the prophet preaches his appalling news. They
laugh at him and think of God as if God were a mere man, who sleeps, gets lost or
is afraid. They do not believe in God. Or so they think, Nietzsche claims.
The alternative interpretations of the death of God in Nietzsche make a
mere Hegelian out of him, a sort of sordid but stylish divulgator of Hegel. God is
death, then, means either or both counterparts of the Hegelian Skeptical
Consciousness: the Unhappy Consciousness or the comic consciousness. Of
course, I do not deny that Nietzsche seems to call upon the same things that Hegel
is pointing out. In the passage of the madman, Nietzsche uses powerful images to
describe the phenomenon he baptized as nihilism.
Bernard Reginster notices the ambiguity with which Nietzsche uses this
word, sometimes in apparently opposite and contradictory ways. He recovers at
least two main meanings of nihilism in Nietzsches work:

[I]t tracks an ambiguity in the ordinary statement of nihilism: Life is not

worth living. On one hand, it may be taken to state that there is in fact no
value in terms of which the world of life could be assessed. In this case,
nihilism is a statement of evaluative indifference: it is neither good nor bad to
exist. On the other hand, the statement could mean that existence does not
live up to our values. In this case, existence is a condemnation of existence:
existence is deplorable or, as Nietzsche says, this world (and our life in it) is
something that rationally should not exist. According to nihilism as
disorientation, there is nothing wrong with the world and something wrong
with our values. According to nihilism as despair, by contrast, there is
nothing wrong with our values but something wrong with world (Reginster,
2009: 33-34).

The madman tries those vulgar atheists grasp the ultimate meaning of the
death of God and he speaks of our Earth erring without direction and the language
he uses leaves any reader cold-hearted. This images are placed there to frame the
infinite pain of which Hegel speaks:

The pure concept, however, or infinity, as the abyss of nothingness in which

all being sinks, must characterize the infinite pain, which previously was only
in culture historically and as the feeling on which rests modern religion, the
feeling that God Himself is dead, (the feeling which was uttered by Pascal,
though only empirically, in his saying: Nature is such that it marks

14
 everywhere, both in and outside of man, a lost God), purely as a phase, but
also as no more than just a phase, of the highest idea (1984, 2: 266).

This passing phase is, nevertheless, accompanied by the contradiction of

the joy and the fear of children left home alone and unsupervised: if something bad
happens, who knows how may they deal with it, but, otherwise, it is a free pass to
invention: without some adult overseeing the children steps, they are left alone to
decide either to follow the rules or to create new rules. The second possibility
seems utterly attractive to Nietzsche, of course.
Besides the dwell of the death of God, we are now left to ourselves in a
world without meaning of its own and, then, a white canvas for our desire, a world
in which we now may become gods ourselves. This is, in broad strokes, the
reading of the New Gospel offered by Sloterdijk (2005): we may now stop
pretending that we praise God when we are really parsing ourselves. The emotion
is tragic, and it would be very well suited Lacrimosa. But it demands a new Art, a
new creative lay religion of the Overman, which he tried to build from the ashes of
Greek Tragedy and its beautiful laments of our lives filled by horrors and ecstasies.
Heidegger also achieves to grasp the cultural meaning of the death of God
for he portrays this happening as the consequence of the regular cycle of raise and
fall of civilizations, characterized by distinct theologies and weltanschauungs that
conceive their own crepuscules, ashes that will eventually make the soil of a new
Religion, a new Philosophy and a new Art, and so on. This never ending cycle is,
nevertheless, capable of achieving the definite picture of it all:

The vague and hackneyed term becoming signifies the overpowering of

power, as the essense of power, which powerfully and continually returns to
itself in its own way. At the same time, the eternal recurrence of the same
offers the keenest interpretation of classical nihilism, which absolutely
obligates any end above and beyond beings. For such a nihilism, the words
God is death suggest the importance not only of the Christian God but of
every transcendent element under which men might want to shelter
themselves. And that impotence signifies the collapse of the old order
(Heidegger, 1961).

Transcendence is canceled. Impossible. We may no longer evade the fact

that we are the creators of Gods and not the other way around. Therefore, we are
left to a religion of fidelity to earth, reconciled with the notion of our being alone in
an erring, indifferent earth.
Heidegger makes a little bit more of it all by understanding the death of God,
nevertheless, as the overcoming of Ontotheology. God cannot be any more a
Swiss Watchmaker, a motor, any of the things in the world nor the addition of them
all. Nevertheless, he loses the ultimate meaning of Nietzsches madman. He is
probably the last of the atheists listening to his speech, a positivist too clever to
think of himself or look like one but he overlooks the most important meaning of
them all. Girard protests that, so far, he is reading Nietzsche as if he was Hegel.

15
But Nietzsche went further than these three characterizations of nihilism, of
despair, of disorientation and the end of Ontotheology.
The first two belong together as counterparts of the same reaction to the
death of God already stated by Hegel. The end of ontotheology, finally, is a
necessary phase in the direction towards the highest idea, for Hegel and Pascal,
a necessary phase between two possible outcomes. Once we are aware that our
past certainties of God were invalid, we are in a position in which we are to create
our own ruling, now without reference to transcendence. But this reading
completely misses the point

To speak primarily of the death of God, apropos of this text, as Heidegger

does, is to fall into the same trap as everybody before. All gods are "beings"
(Seiende) with a certain historical lifespan, and then they must die, unlike
Being itself (Sein). Now that the twilight of the biblical God has finally come,
similar to the twilight and death of the pagan gods before, Dionysus for
instance, some entirely new gods may well show up in the future (Girard,
2000: 258).

Heideggers interpretation is that of Hegel in Faith and Knowledge (1802),

and that is why only a God can save us (1966):

The pure concept, however, or infinity, as the abyss of nothingness in which

all being sinks, must characterize the infinite pain, which previously was only
in culture historically and as the feeling on which rests modern religion, the
feeling that God Himself is dead, (the feeling which was uttered by Pascal,
though only empirically, in his saying: Nature is such that it marks
everywhere, both in and outside of man, a lost God), purely as a phase, but
also as no more than just a phase, of the highest idea (Hegel, 1984, 2: 266).

Nietzsches use of the term nihilism is often an accusation against

Christianity and Platonism and it may cast light on the meaning of his use of the
expression God is death. The way in which he calls them nihilistic may also be
directed against, for instance, Schopenhauers or Dostoyevskys last turn towards
compassion. Otherwise widely admired by Nietzsche, they become his enemies
the minute they talk, like Jesus or Socrates, of compassion or the soul. Nietzsches
account of nihilism is a claim against compassion and for heroic, pagan virtues,
potencies, powers. In comparison, he is thinking of compassion as nihilistic, Girard
argues.
The true, shouting singularity of Nietzsches accout of the death of God is
close to Hegels when thinking of it as a regular element of the cycle of death and
redemption of Christianity, but much finer, for he understand not only Gods death,
but Gods murder:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the
murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most

16
 powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our
knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean
ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have
to invent? (Nietzsche, GS, 125).

Most contemporary readers of Nietzsche attribute this language to a

rhetorical effect intended by Nietzsche, for they do not ever comment the fact that
Nietzsche is not just saying that God is death, but that we have killed him, even if
we are unable to remember how we did it or how could we have ever done such a
thing, so far away in time from those events. But he does not mean, of course, we
were there, that Friday, shouting Crucify him!. He is thinking of the only obvious
dogma, but the hardest thing to see: that what religious tradition calls original sin
and its relation to the emergence of evil in Creation. He is thinking of it in relation to
human sacrifice, the central happening of all religions:

Both Nietzsche and Girard are "christocentric." That is, the real point of
departure for both is the Crucified as the center of history. For Nietzsche,
the Crucified is the center of past history but his reign over morality must
end with the murder of God (The Gay Science, no. 125) and the beginning
of a new era. For Girard, the Crucified is the Innocent Victim who reveals the
scapegoat mechanism of human culture and the love that overcomes it
(2000: 242).

Not the death of God, but his murder is what Nietzsche is claiming. His
position, then, defends the idea of sacrificial foundation of culture as the original
social pact, and the reenactment of that sacrifice as religion. Modernity rests in the
idea that Religion is the origin of violence and Anthropology seems to confirm the
repetition of sacrifices in every culture. But he is perspicuous enough to notice that,
despite this monotonous truth, there were at least to distinct positions before it, and
not only one.
A late passage of Nietzsche on the death of God explains the ultimate
richness, the source of his fine thought. It follows the title Dionysus vs the
Crucified:

Dionysus versus the "Crucified": there you have the antithesis. It is not a
difference in regard to their martyrdomit is a difference in the meaning of it.
Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, creates torment,
destruction, the will to annihilation. In the other case, sufferingthe "Crucified
as the innocent one" counts as an objection to this life, as a formula for its
condemnation. One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of
suffering: whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the former
case, it is supposed to be the path to a holy existence; in the latter case,
being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of
suffering. The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering... Dionysus cut

17
 to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from
destruction (Nietzsche, WP, 1052).

Girard reads in this passage the centrality of sacrifice to Nietzsches

Philosophy, the continuity of Ancient religion and Christianity sacrifice, and the
difference between pagan and Christian: the prohibition to commit murder and the
comprehension of sacrifice as sheer murder (1984: 816-35). The exclusive
opposition between Dionysus and the Crucified, even if they are both characters
of the cycle of texts we know as on death and resurrection, a genre quite common
around the Mediterranean, they are characters that stand for opposite ways of
valuing. The way of nature and the way of grace. The way of nature choices
deception, to hide ones own victims. The way of grace choses to become a victim
before ever becoming Aquiles reigning over a pile of dry bones. Nietzsches claim
is, then, not only moral, like Kant, or mainly intellectual, like Hegels, but religious,
like Girards. To know oneself, as Socrates proposed, is to know oneself as sinner,
in the way in which Augustin acknowledged himself as another one, so luminously,
in his Confessions. The problem of evil, then, stands in the center of the religious
experience and in the center of the regular religious cycle of sin and redemption.

Metanoia

Our only health is the disease

If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adams curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness
must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital

()

The dripping blood our only drink,

The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh
and blood
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday
good.

Eliot, FQ, EC, IV, 1969: 187

Heideggers (failed) attempt to overcome Ontotheology, nevertheless, is not trivial,

but it is much better accomplished by Ren Girard, who, like many others, followed

18
the early steps of Eliot in trying to find the origin of Religion and the foundation of
Culture. Everywhere he looked at, he noticed the regularity of myths, rituals and
moral codes. He concluded that man is religious, following Nietzsches own claim
that we ought to invent new rituals and create new myths and morals. Such a
religious display of every culture was attributed by the Aufklrung to infancy and
credulity of superfluous entertainments that we now need no more, adults as we
are. Girard shows that Religion has not so much to do with a violent ideology as it
has to do with a justification of the sacrificial murder of innocents (Dinoysus) or an
attempt to avoid it or to deal with violence: it shows not that superfluous, then.
A recent very popular book on this topic, I think, has the merit of point out the
centrality of Hegels and Nietzsches rational theology account when discussing
which God died in the cross: The Monstruosity of Christ (2009). While John
Milbank defends a traditional religious approach to the mystery of redemption,
Zizek derives atheism from Christianity as a logical consequence. In the end, they
are discussing Jesus divinity and resurrection. Milbank signs for it. Zizek, against
it.
For Eliot, that which Philosophy must be silent about may be, nevertheless,
somehow understood as a reconciliation with silence:

And what we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The world neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together (Eliot, FQ, V, 1969: 208).

Eliot discovers, I think, in John of the Cross, a possibility that does not abhor
reason to sustain the, nonetheless, impossible communion of timeless God and
finite man, one which, For most of us, this is the aim/ Never here to be realized:

() These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved

19
 And has in it no source of movement (Eliot, FQ, DV, V, 1969: 199).

This was Eliots turning point towards not only the possibility of admitting the
superiority of Revealed Theology as a way of getting to know God beyond the
natural perspective of reason, but, more importantly, this was Eliots final openness
to Revelation, present in the Scriptures and a Tradition incarnated in History. More
importantly, for Eliot, the Skpetical consciousness derived in the usual admission of
the source from which Revealed Theology derives and that nurtures it: life as
liturgy, religious life. He would eventually come to think that which was already a
tedious truth when the author of the Ecclesiastes wrote it there is nothing new
under the sun (1: 9): Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas.

And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once, or twice, or several times, by men who one cannot hope
To emulatebut it is no competition
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor lost.
For us, there is only trying. The rest is not our business (FQ, EC, V, 1969:
189).

In a very philosophical treatise on the work of the critic, he would thus ponder
now Philosophy, in his seek for the perfect critic (The Sacred Wood, 1920):

During a good part of History the philosopher endeavored to deal with objects
which he believed to be of the same exactness as the mathematicians. Finally
Hegel arrived, and if not perhaps the first, he was certainly the most prodigious
exponent of emotional systematization, dealing with his emotions as if they
were definite objects which had aroused these emotions. His followers have as
a rule taken for granted that words have definite meanings, overlooking the
tendency of words to become indefinite emotions. (No one who had not
witnessed the event could imagine the conviction in the tone of Professor
Eucken as he pounded the table and exclaimed Was ist Geist? Geist ist). If
verbalism were confined to professional philosophers, no harm would be done.
But their corruption has extended very far (Eliot, quoted by Glasser, 2005: 32).

His poetry certainly inherits, as much as his judgement on the matter, the
Hegelian ability to deal with words not only in relation to concepts, but to feelings.
But it also sheltered him against their outburst, by providing a background for their
examination and, then, a certain distance that allowed him to deal with them
ironically or to sublimate them. This probably explains why Eliots poetry is at the
same time so moving and so cerebral. He deals, as Hegel and Nietzsche, with
rational emotions and with emotive arguments.

20
 The systematic philosophical study of his poetry is, nevertheless,
underdeveloped. Probably, due to the prejudice, stated by Hegel, but originated in
Platos critique to Poetry, that prose requires greater self-consciousness than
poetry (Hegel, 1905: 169).
I will argue that Eliot challenges the arrangement that places Poetry under
Philosophy, by treating the death ends of the former as the ladder towards a
greater consciousness and, even, as a form of language capable of achieving
greater clarity in the development of a more refined and, even, precise language
than the scientific or the merely philosophical. Not all Poetry, of course, but pure
poetry, which consists in a purified language capable of speaking not about, but to
God in a manner which Philosophy, simply, cannot deliver.
Eliot, of course, is analytical enough not to confuse the methods and
pretensions of Poetry and Philosophy (Muzina: 27-35), but his poetry certainly
deals with philosophical issues constantly, and does so in a proper philosophical
way. But that is not all that there is to see in Eliots poetry, and that is precisely the
point of Eliots turn to Philosophy, I will argue.

To purify Language. The Poets work after the death of God

Between the idea

And the reality
Between de motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

(Eliot, HM, 1963: p. 82).

Eliots 1926 Cambridge lectures cast light upon the reason why Eliot decided to
write Poetry over Philosophy. Spears Brooker states it plainly: he had come to
believe that poetry could deliver what philosophy could not (Chinitz, 2009: 62).
Nevertheless, his Poetry was not that of a philistine, but that of a philosopher for,
even if he changed the genre, he did not change his original aims: to gain wisdom
on God, the soul and the world. But he was not as barehanded and disoriented as
he perceived himself, now he had faced the death ends of Modern Philosophy. He
had, at least, a philosophical discipline, which he never renounced and that gave
him the habit of inquiry, the ability not to become dogmatic and the humility not
attempt impossible aims, as well as a very well furnished library.
In Eliots poetry, many of his philosophical inquiries are resolved, not simply
evaded or too soon conquered. There is a method to it. A method which grounds in
classical Metaphysics and deals with the object of Philosophia Prima, but does so
in a rigorous way that does not foresee the struggles and objections of Modern

21
Philosophy. Therefore, despite Eliots new focus in Poetry, it cannot be separated
from its philosophical roots, Manju Jain argues:

In his discussion of the relationship of Philosophy and Poetry, the crucial

distinction that Eliot makes is that between theory and vision. Philosophy is
the statement of a theory; poetry is the embodiment of a concrete vision
However, if poetry, for Eliot, expresses a vision of life and not a theory, this
vision is incomplete if it does not include some Philosophy (1992: 246).

For instance, Daniel Berthold-Bond, at Hegels Grand Synthesis. A Study on

Being, Thought and History, notices that Little Gidding may wall serve as a
poetic encapsulation of the spirit of Hegels teleological circle (1989):

We shall not cease from exploration,

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time,
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is what was at the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall (Eliot, FQ, LG, V: 208).

Solomon compares the inner logical structure of The Waste Land to that of
The Phenomenology of the Spirit in his book In the Spirit of Hegel (1985: 211), but
there is certainly a much deeper relation between both books and that connection
relates with the reason behind Eliots turn to Poetry. There is an open dialogue
between Eliots poetry and the most notable accounts of the death of God and the
end of Art and History: Hegels and, of course, its prophet: Nietzsches.
Carl Rapp, while objecting it, notes which is the key to understand Eliots
turn: if the points of view adopted by the different voices of the first poems, but
chiefly of The Waste Land, and their irony towards a reality, otherwise, of angst,
represented very well the cultural reception of Nietzsches prophecy, many of his
readers protested what they saw as Eliots flee from reality into religion:

Many of Eliots readers sympathized deeply with the exquisite sufferings

exhibited by the early personae and did not wish to see them resolved by a
plunge into religion. Consequently, they refused to follow Eliots own
example after 1927. For these readers, Eliots display of paralyzed
inwardness was their truth and indeed the truth of modern man (Maker,
2000: 18).

Hegel himself, nevertheless, was critical about their truth already at the
Phenomenology of the Spirit, for its pretense was to achieve an Absolut knowledge
and not Absolut doubt; non in vain, it has been called Gods autobiography.

22
Another thing is the matter of whether he achieved his goal and was able to
transcend Kants exile of Philosophia Prima to the Realm of Ends of practical
reason and to the consideration of nature as a system of ends and his teleological
moral argument of God.
Hegel, of course, foresaw the possibility of accounting for the death of God
(a regular element in the Christian cycle of redemption) to religion:

The utter despair in respect of thought, of truth, and absolute objectivity, as

also the incapacity to give oneself any settled basis or spontainety of action,
induced the noble soul to abandon itself to feeling and in Religion something
steadfast This instinct impelling us towards something fixed has forced
many into positive forms of religion, into Catholicism, superstition and
miracle working, in order to find something on which they can rest, because
to inward subjectivity everything fluctuates and wavers (Hegel, quoted by
Rapp at Maker, 2000:18).

The tone of this paragraph does not seem to be very fond on the possibility
of going back to religion: taking it as something steadfast would mean a
deception undertaken knowingly. That is why Hegel characterizes that kind of
religion closely linked to superstition. Such a religion is an intellectual suicide and
may not be believed for it is perceived as mere theatricality.
Ironically, on the other hand, the crypto-Christian atheist Albert Camus went
the other way around the former Jesuit Heidegger, and he was who baptized
Nietzsche when reading him in neither of the ways we have dealt with, but in the
way that Theothanatheology (William Hamilton, TJJ Altizer, JD Caputo, J
Robinson) would interpret Nietzsche, almost as a Christian prophet who writes
using some kind of reverse psychology rhetoric tricks as to driving, in opposition to
him, new forms of religion. Prellwitz remarks the admiration Nietzsche had for
Emerson, the only non European of his top four writers, and a master of prose.
He follows Kaufmann (2000: 100) in stablishing the probable influence of
Emersons self-definition as a professor of the joyous science and in supporting
Higgins (2000: 100) in the high probability of Nietzsche having red Emersons claim
that Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and
done, as if God were death (Emerson, quoted by Prellwitz: 30).
He would read the passage on the death of God as a cultural and spiritual crisis
that Nietzsche prophesized, still unfolding today:

Contrary to the opinion of certain of his Christian critics, Nietzsche did not form a
project to kill God. He found Him dead in the soul of his contemporaries. HE was
the first to understand the immense importance of the event and to decide that
this rebellion among men could not lead to a renaissance unless it were
controlled and directed. Any other attitude towards it, whether it were regret or
complacency, must lead to the apocalypse. Thus Nietzsche did not formulate a
philosophy of rebellion, but constructed a philosophy on rebellion (1951).

23
 In this las sense, we may also understand religion as a continuation of
Philosophy and Nietzsche as the prophet not only of nihilism but of its overcoming.
For Eliot, I think, this was somewhat the case:

For Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, it was Socrates who dissociated the
Apollonian and the Dionysian by asking such abstract questions as What is the
Good? and What is he Beautiful? Throughout the first third of twentieth
century, intellectuals all over Europe found in this historical scheme a way to
analyze the malaise of their own times. The Birth of Tragedy served as a major
source for T. S. Eliot, for example, who found that what he called a dissociation
of sensibility had occurred in the seventeenth century after the death of John
Donne, the last poet who could fuse thinking and feeling (Bakhtin: 253-256).

If from Silence (1910) and up to The Hollow Men (1925), he stresses the
death of God, he already foresees the possibility of transcendence for natural
reason lets the world disenchanted, but also a disenchanted world of desire
unfulfilled, of freedom as futile passion, seems to consist in a thirst which is, by
definition, unquenchable.
At the end of his career, the man who became synonymous with rigorous
knowledge, Thomas Aquinas, is said to have experienced a mystical experience
that made him understand how poor and unprecise his thought was. He resolved,
then, to confide his Opera Omnia to fire. But he was stopped from doing so and he
resolved, then, to write poetry for a change.
If Kants genius as Platos poet is incapable of telling what he is saying nor
where it comes from, here we have a scholastic poet, capable of explaining the
transcendental. Greek poets and Modern geniuses are blind to the source of their
own poetry. But the Christian mystic is perfectly capable of accounting for the
source of his poetry and for the meaning of what he is saying if he also can
communicate in the common language of Philosophy. Aquinas was a a
Philosopher who climbed the ladder all the way to the top, to Theology, first, and to
Liturgy, at last. In a different proportion, but in the same fashion, John of the Cross
was a poet who would try to make sense of his own poetical voice, albeit his
teachers, Humiliation and Sorrow, thought him the Poetry, first, and he used the
ladder of Philosophy to climb down. Those notes on the poem everybody seems to
think of as very original in TS Eliots Wasteland are already present in Johns
poetry.
Eliot, aside to John of the Cross or Dante, contend against Plato and a long
tradition subscribing authors like Aristotle, Kant or Hegel, for the first place in the
knowledge of those matters which are more dear to us, and which Kant stripped off
the highest form of Metaphysics: (Theoretical) Theology. If Philosophy cannot deal
with determining reality before our eyes, let alone God! But

Good poetry [] takes abstractions, thoughts, and ideas and transforms

them so that they are experienced, at least momentarily, as feelings rather
than thoughts, in the body instead of the brain. Genuine poetry elevates

24
 sense for a moment to regions ordinarily attainable only by abstract thought,
or... clothes the abstract, for a moment, with all the painful delight of flesh
(Eliot, quoted by Spears Brooker at Chinitz, 2009).

Such view is coherent with the Hegelian Aesthetic theory, which also argues
that the difference between Philosophy and Poetry lays in the position they stand in
relation to the conceptual dimension of their work. Even if both, Philosophy and
Poetry deal with concepts, Philosophy is stuck with nothing but concepts to go
along, while poetry legitimately deals with concepts in relation to images. In his
classification of arts, that goes from sensitive to rational and from Architecture to
Poetry, Hegel positioned the last as the most conceptual form of Art (1988),
following the kind of interest arouse in Aristotle towards Athenian Tragedy and the
same evaluation of poetry as given then to Tragedy as closer to Philosophy than
any other discipline. Of course, we may trace this back to Platos critique and use
of myths, most easily seen in the Republic, where he used the word Theology to
describe the knowledge of the Gods present in Homeric chants and Hesiodic
Theogony and where he suggested a philosophical reevaluation of his religious
tradition.

Eliots sought show him as a seeker of the transcendent reality. Kirk explains:
these Hollow Men dare not meet those Eyes Christs, or the reproachful eyes of
Dantes Beatrice that would demand repentance and the ordeal of regeneration;
fearful, they hide in deaths dream kingdom preferring the illusion to transcendent
reality (1972: 130). All along his poems, Eliot displayed a mystical and religious
antithesis to the one offered by the Existentialist Philosophy of his contemporaries.
Subject to further analysis, theres the question of Eliots view on freedom of
religion and his own enthusiastic studies of several ancient and contemporary
traditions. The Indian culture deserves a special mention in Eliots influences,
already in the poetry linked to his early studies of philosophy with Irving Babbitt.
However, it is relevant to mention it as an example of a certain brand of German-
Philosophy dualism between facts and ideas, as a crucial moment in the path
towards which this spirituality aims.
When Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it was immediately regarded
as a masterful artwork. It was, in a way, the most accomplished canonization of
freestyle verse in poetry and seemed the perfect picture of the death of God and
the pessimistic disbelief of his generation, a mirror to the perceived collapse of an
era and the nostalgia of life under God, now impossible to believe in.
After the unprecedented and brilliant edition of Eliots original manuscript by
Ezra Pound, the form of the poem acquired a cinematographic quality to it, not only
because of the narrative potency of the scenes it suggests but because of the way
it was cut into fragments that suggest a cinematographic narrative. Such a poetic
effect, nonetheless, leaves the reader of The Waste Land with the acute sensation

25
of a seemingly endless succession of fragmented experiences that point out the
lack of unity of experience in an astray world, wandering without a sun.
For Eliots early readers, it was a great shock, then, when he started
publishing a more traditional kind of poetry, which was thought of as overcame by
everyone, either in terms of the optimistic point of view of its religiousness and in
terms of the rehabilitation of classical meters in his versification. Such an
astonishing change was even seen as a step backwards on Eliots poetical quest.
Otherwise, Walter Redmond argues in The Spirituality of TS Eliot that even
if we must understand Eliots poetical works as a single whole, the reception
portrayed is unfair with Eliots own poetical intentions. He argues that this
recognizable rupture reflects a certain turning of Eliots own life: his religious
conversion to Anglo-Catholicism. Therefore, we should also relate to his works
taking into account two distinct moments of his unitary poetical journey, best
represented by The Waste Land and the Four Quartets, a turn we may recognize
from Ash Wednesday (1930) onwards:2

Eliots spirituality was just this turning: from time to eternity, from depression
to hope. But coming through the Waste Land to Christ, for Eliot, is not a
flight from reality and his view is traditional in Christianity, but a search for
its Source. The reader of The Waste Land and Four Quartets will trace and
re-experience this journey (Redmond, W., manuscript in preparation).

The movie Through a Glass, Darkly (1961) by Ingmar Bergman portrays this
crisis as the fracture of the false images of God: a God which is either an echo or a
spider. A god that does not exist, but that we take to be God, unaware of what we
are told by theologians: Si comprehendis, non est Deus.

Via Negativa in Eliots Poetry. A Method to make a Philosophy that Sings

When Nietzsche wrote, sixteen years after writing it, a new prologue to his The
Birth of Tragedy, he regretted how philosophical he had tried to be, how
demonstrative and systematical. He now claims that he should have sang his book
and he sang elsewhere, alright. If several philosophers, as Kierkegaard or
Camus, have tried to make a theatrical Philosophy, by writing novels, Eliot, an
enthusiast reader of The Birth of Tragedy, has dared to make of the ends of
Philosophy an occasion to sing.

2
I think that the poem from 1920, before even publishing The Waste Land, already carries out, in a
nutshell, the kind of reconciliation that he would latter on reach in the Four Quartets, between
pessimism for humanity is imperfect, sinful and cant acquire the desired state of ideality and an
optimism not driven by the merely flesh and blood, but by the being one with God of the Church,
whose trust is in the Blood of the Lamb that shall wash him [the hypoppotamus] clean.

26
 Eliots conversion into Anglicanism resulted from his search for the mystical
knowledge: he felt that, through his new Trinitarian sacramentalism, he would be
incorporated into the supernatural life which was the goal of all the religions he had
studied (Sencourt, 1971). It is important to stress that, even if he was already
Christian and educated as such, he was raised into a somehow rationalistic church
which even doubted of Christs divinity. Hence, admitting Christs divinity was not
already a given, for Eliot, as it was for Pascal. Therefore, it is important to
understand the way in which religious experience drove and transformed his
poetry, even if it has been stressed that Eliots poetry was already Christian from
Silence (written in 1910, during his school years) onwards, and there is certainly
a series of references to redemption, as that to be found in The burial of the
death, at the corpse planted in Stetsons garden, of which we listen to the
question: Has it began to sprout? Will it bloom this year? (Eliot, WL, BD: 55), at
the end of the first poem of The Waste Land.
It looks like, by devoting to this quest, he found the way in a spiritual path
that he started following during college. This religiousness is present in his two
most celebrated poems: The Waste Land and Four Quartets. That makes them the
obvious object of study for this philosophical research. But some others of his
works are worth a mention. Specially, his Choruses from The Rock, from 1934
and his play on martyrdom, which closely linked to Four Quartets and Murder in the
cathedral (1952), first staged in 1935.
But before analyzing them, we should also take in account his first Christian
poem, all but strangely, on conversion: Ash-Wednesday. According with
Schneider, it is an assertion of the truth of Christ as the Word, an assertion that
this is the Reality, even if one has not brought oneself to acknowledge it fully
(1975: 122-123). This shows the dialectic relation established by Bradley and
followed by Eliot, but also the beginning of the suggested dissertation between the
affirmative and the negative theology. Ash Wednesdey sets a dialogue with Johns
Prologue to the Gospel (1, 1-18) a, in that regard:

And the light shone in the darkness and

Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the center of the silent Word.
Then he asks where to find the word:
Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land (1963: 92).

This word may be rejected and, just as in Johns Gospel, it has been
rejected in Modernity, hence: although I do not hope to turn again (Eliot, 1963:
94). The Waste Land stands for a barrier between men and God: Without religion,
society became a wasteland (Sarin, 2008: 3), so, somehow, he continues
describing those who will not leave the wasteland because of denying God when
departing from the virtue and faith as told by Micah 6:3: Oh my people, what have
I done unto thee:

27
 For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk
among noise and deny the voice (1963: 92).

This introduces the possibility of reading The Waste Land and the Four
Quartets as dealing with the two moments of the hermeneutical circle as suggested
by Dionysus the Aeropagite in his via of eminence beyond contradiction, exposed
in Dionysus On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchies, a book that talks about angels, but
that is, at the same time, a true spiritual and moral treaty. He does the same in On
the Celestial Hierarchies, where he talks about the angels in relation to the lives of
the saints: when we speak of them all, or some of them, indiscriminately, as
Heavenly Beings or Heavenly Powers, we must consider that we manifest those
about whom we speak in general way, from their essence or power severally
(Dionysius the Areopagite, 2004a).3
His method derives in the elaboration of a theology in two moments, called
negative and positive theologies, but they are not opposed doctrines, but two
distinct moments of one same hermeneutical process. The negative theology
denies the analogy of God and our experience of the world, rejecting the
conception of God as anything accessible to the senses or to human intellectual
conception, which heavily relies on experience to distinguish actual knowledge a
critique not unlike philosophical critique. It demands, nevertheless, an ascetic
state: its ending is not in the mere negation of any imago Dei, which would leave
us barehanded. The affirmative theology, then, affirms the eminence of God above
our contradictory conceptions of his perfections.
The union with God, the goal of mystical theology, matches with the
divinization, for it is necessary to leave every non-divine operation, every non-
divine object:

And through the inactivity of all his reasoning powers is untied by his highest
faculty to it that is wholly unknowable; thus, by knowing nothing he knows
That which is beyond his knowledge (Dionysius the Areopagite, 2004b).

I will argue that this is the meaning of the ladder of mystical knowledge
referred in the Eliots adoption of the verses written by the poet St. John of the
Cross, in The Spiritual Canticle:

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know

3
I couldnt lay may hand on Mignes canonic editions.

28
 You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not (EC III, 1963: p. 187).

The negative theology is, nevertheless, a step towards a legitimate

knowledge of God, beyond analogy, and in relation to a way of eminence: the
negation of that which is not God, for no one ever saw God (John 1:18), finally
allows us to elaborate an affirmative theology through the reconciliation of
contraries such as Justice and Mercy in the simplicity of God.
In order to complete the hermeneutical cycle, as portrayed by Dionysus the
Aeropagite, a positive theology may be obtained after the dark night of the soul
(Saint John of the Cross):

The Divine gloom is the unapproachable light in which God is said to dwell.
And in this gloom, invisible indeed, on account of the surpassing brightness,
and unapproachable on account of the excess of the superessential stream
of light, enters every one deemed worthy to know and to see God, by the
very fact of neither seeing nor knowing, really entering Hum, Who is above
vision and knowledge, knowing this very thing, that He is after all the object
of sensible and intelligent perception, and saying in the words of the
Prophet: Thy knowledge, was regarded as wonderful by me; It as
confirmed; I can by no mains attain unto it (Dionysius the Areopagite, Ep.
5, 1073A-1076A; CD II, 162.1-163.5).

Praeambula fidei (Aquinas, S.Th.I, q.2, ad.1), from this perspective, happen
to reach a new scope in relation to those derived from the traditional five proofs on
Gods existence, for such a knowledge, even if it is driven by the knowledge of the
intellect, is not entirely really realized there, for it is really obtained throughout the
conformation with the Divine through liturgical adoration and charity: throughout
communion. Without the affirmative theology, then, the negative losses its vigor
and remains incomplete, but affirmative theology, itself, does not end in argument
but in a dialogue throughout which the creature adores the Creator, such as
Francis of Assisis Canticle of Creation:

I praise and bless you, Lord,

and I give thanks to you,
and I will serve you in all humility (FAED 113-114).

Divinization consists in reaching God through love; through an imitation of

Gods love, whose image is the God made man killed in the cross, whose death is

29
our life. Mystical knowledges first instance is charity, thanks to the fact that love in
a sort of divine way includes a knowledge that cant be reach thanks to how
imperfect humans are, for human eyes cant bear too much reality (Eliot, WL,
1963: verse 428) and we cant even begin to grasp whats ahead of us. Anyway, it
may manifest itself through the kind of sight offered by the eyes of faith, which are
the eyes of contemplation of love not those of scientific knowledge, seeking
mostly instrumentally, rarely contemplating theoretically and hardly ever taking
over the burden of love, which is, anyway, beyond its legitimate limits.
Every path towards God has a symbolic characteristic, so none of it faces its
definite vision and it is through the symbolic that affirmative and negative are
united. The symbolic has two steps: one at the beginning of the path towards the
union with God and the other one at the end: In my beginning is my end (Eliot,
EC, 1963: p. 182).
In that respect, Eliots journey is not unlike that of Modernity, whose roots he
assumed and synthetized in a new arrangement which is, nonetheless, the very
same way of mystical experience, as portrayed by John of the Crosss poetry, and
argued in philosophical and revealed theology. Maybe, then, as Eliot wrote in Little
Gidding:

the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started (1969: 197).

Objectives

To evaluate Aquinas interpretation of the hermeneutical circle as a logical

argument. In order to do so, I will attempt to formalize Aquinas explanation
of Dionysus Via Negativa, using the aids of symbolic logic in order to
determine its true value and its validity.
To try to show a way in which Philosophy may rethink its possibility to reach
for wisdom and become, again, more than a mere phenomenological,
logical or linguistic analysis, without ignoring the contemporary philosophical
tradition and its quest for wisdom.
Furthermore I will propose an analysis of the negative theology as a horizon
not intended to give us knowledge on Gods essence through mere
intelligence, but as a call to a turn, a conversion. Therefore, perhaps it
should be regarded more as a way of life in hope than a mere logical
argument.
If so, it therefore, an existential frame, more than a mean for knowledge.
To Analyze Eliots poetry as a document both of both philosophical and
theological relevance.
To read The Waste Land and the Four Quartets from the point of view of
Dionysius the Areopagites hermeneutical circle.

30
 To exemplify the use of both affirmative and negative theologies in Eliots
poetry, with his own conversion as the key to interpret the turn of his poetry
and the register in which he (does not) speak of God, rejecting his
representation, but speaking to God, eventually.

Methodology
1. Hermeneutic circle.
2. Critic of Literature

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