Founded in 1980, the Society is an international association of persons interested in the art and thought of T. S. Eliot. “The Church is not merely for the elect – in other words, those whose temperament brings them to that belief and that behavior. We need to recover the sense of religious fear, so that it can be overcome by religious hope.” We may infer from Eliot’s remarks that budding young theologians worth their salt could intelligently survey the writings of the early Fathers and extract from them the necessary policies and procedures that will put orthodox Christianity back on its feet. The year 1935 saw the premiere of T.S. Christianity has also, in the main, opposed adultery as a wound to the family, and it has opposed divorce as a wound from which the family cannot recover. And so, by implication, it is no surprise that Christianity will oppose the abortion of those yet to be born, or the euthanasia of those too old to fend for themselves. That is, far from a purely evangelical purpose, Eliot’s is intellectual. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made.” Anyone who believes that a whole new mythology must be created to supplant the story of Christ’s mission, and a new morality must be found to replace his, will have to reckon with the State imposition of such a mythology and morality.
In his earlier years Eliot abandoned the liberal Unitarian faith of his grandfather in which he had been baptized. But in a culture with diverse religions competing, or religions competing with widespread atheism, such as our own, the world would have a more difficult time promoting positive moral conduct. In these writings, such as The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), he can be seen as a deeply involved and thoughtful Christian poet in the process of making sense of the world between the two World Wars. Eliot rightly detects what has happened to the family in recent times. The same year, he also gave up his American citizenship and became a British subject.
The reaction of some of Eliot’s British contemporaries to his conversion ranged from mild disbelief to full-throated contempt. In fact, frail Tom spent much of his childhood curled up in a big leather armchair reading. Whereas in the early phase of a civilization the different functions of a society that support each other may for a time do so, in the later phase they may cease to do so for one reason or another. “We need to see the world as the Christian Fathers saw it; and the purpose of re-ascending to origins is that we should be able to return, with greater spiritual knowledge, to our own situation.
Eliot offers a definite and do-able one by hearkening back to the early Christian Fathers who had to survive and toil to make Christianity prosper in a dominantly pagan world. The man who wrote the most despairing poem of the twentieth century is today mostly remembered as the author of doggerel verse made popular in the hit musical It endeavours to foster the culture of life by reporting truthfully, critically, contextually, and comparatively with a view to history and guided by a cultural vision inspired by Catholic doctrine and the classical liberal arts.Further our mission through your prayer and donation. Whereas two or more moral codes could exist in other cultures (such as one for the rich and one for the poor in Hinduism) Christianity had taught that rich and poor were equally accountable to the same God. When asked her views on abortion, she was virtually indicted as suspect because she was Catholic. Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis to a family descended from New England stock. He never returned to take his oral examination, which was all that stood between him and a Harvard Ph.D.
Also rife throughout the mainstream media are recent attempts to stifle coverage of free speech that is critical of political correctness, not to mention promoting “fake news” that manipulates the public like Pavlov’s dog.For Eliot the essential defect of modern civilization is that it is highly materialistic, while simultaneously pretending that it holds the high moral ground. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made.
The artistic sensibility is impoverished by its divorce from the religious sensibility, the religious by its separation from the artistic.” But the ramifications for the entire culture are clear: without art and religion serving each other, as they so well did in the Middle Ages, how will people know what their own values are, and how will they learn to celebrate how beautiful and precious those values are?The spiritual malaise of western cultures cannot help but to produce by-products evident to anyone who is willing to see them. Eliot's despair, however, was short-lived. Eliot believed his finest achievement was writing the broadly religious poem "Four Quartets" (1943). (“He who is not with me is against me.” Luke 11:23) Here Eliot indicts especially the British culture, which has been industrialized longer than any other. Christianity Today strengthens the church by richly communicating the breadth of the true, good, and beautiful gospel. If that one man is lunatic (we have seen this more than once in the last century) the whole nation will become a lunatic asylum to appease him or else die by his command.As Eliot says, “When we consider the problem of evangelizing, of the development of a Christian society, we have reason to quail.” We have considerably more reason to quail now than when Eliot wrote that sentence seventy years ago. Recently a candidate for appointment to a federal judgeship was interviewed by members of Congress.