It once was a given that as age waxes beyond the blind optimism of youth we must live with the more sobering fact that life can be an exercise in managing disappointment. We are destined to see many of the hopes we carried with us in early adulthood thwarted as we deal with the cumulative weight of our own fragility. However, it is not supposed to be this way, or so our culture tells us. A quintessentially misguided mythology has emerged that our inevitable return to the dust is a nuisance that stands in the way of our ambitions and need not be a reality that informs the manner in which we carry on in pursuit of happiness in this world that has become our unalienable right to possess. This fiction is largely shaped in the modern world by the fact that longevity can be attained by advances in medicine and the wizardry of technology. We exist in a society that has sanitized mortality, where the province of death is relegated to fluorescent lit hospital rooms away from view of the general public who cannot be bothered with such things as they endeavor to live their best life now. Thanks to Botox, balding solutions, medications that promise virility even to septuagenarians, and the adept use of silicone and scalpels, youth can be shamelessly reenacted by individuals well past their prime. Beneath all of this is an unspoken desperation that our aspirations, even when attained will come to naught and we eventually succumb to the inexorable reality of the grave. 

Life in the body certainly entails moments of radiant happiness, but more often than not it is fraught with unfulfilled desires and bitter battles to overcome the inertia of ingrained bad habits. To age is to experience the slow defeat of what we had hoped to become. Betrayal becomes the name of the game as we live with the wounds others have inflicted upon us and the wounds we have inflicted on others. To compound matters our body begins to turn against us. This makes the prevailing mythology that enduring satisfaction can be had in this life supremely unsatisfying; it is, after all the kind of fairy-tale that cannot possibly come true because the unassailable fact of suffering makes no room for our sentimental wishes that life could be otherwise. There are precious few voices who have summoned the sagacity to cut through the mawkish stories we tell ourselves and cast forth a vision of life that looks through its painful struggles to find enduring comfort.

Enter the modern day prophet TS Eliot who cemented himself as the necessary voice in the wilderness who put the inconvenient question to our contemporary conceits. Eliot’s Four Quartets is a cathedral for the modern Christian imagination whose arresting poetic images are as capacious as they are disturbing. These four individual poems were written during the later period of his poetic career, which he cynically derides as “Twenty years largely wasted, the years  l’entre deux guerres,” spanning the years of 1936-1942 when Europe reprised the wreckage of the First World War in the devastations of the Second.¹ While this long, often perplexing work includes meditations on time, the vanity of human endeavors, mortality, and artistic failure, there shines a resplendent universal hope that insists alongside Dame Julian of Norwich that “all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”² However, before we arrive at the shining conclusion of the Quartets, Eliot takes us on a journey of divestiture, where “In order to possess what you do not possess / you must go by the way of dispossession.”³

Most of this masterpiece is written in Eliot’s typical free verse that employs a symphony of imagery and repetition in order to underscore the contemplative tone of the work. However, in three of the fourth movements in the Quartets – Burnt Norton IV, East Coker IV, and Little Gidding IV, with the exception of Dry Salvages IV – Eliot breaks with his conventional style for a more tightly structured approach that grips the reader by drawing attention to the fundamental point he seeks to make in each of his four poems. In East Coker IV, Eliot uses a rhyme scheme of ABABB in his five-line stanzas; the meditation generally scans in iambic meter – the first three lines in each stanza in tetrameter, the fourth line pentameter, and the fifth in hexameter. The rhythm and rhyme of this section evokes a sense of urgency that breaks with the ruminations that move with elliptical tentativity through much of the work as a whole. The fundamental point that he drives at in East Coker IV is that, in this life, the disease is the cure that sends fleeing into the sufferings of Christ on Good Friday, where the only solace to be found is Eucharistic:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art\
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

  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 Adam’s curse
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.‍  

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

 The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.‍ 

 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.⁴

Far from the triumphal inclinations that typify the elite in British society,⁵ which should be read as an extension of modern society as a whole, Eliot insists that mortality is the only path to spiritual healing. In this most Christocentric portion of the Quartets, life is destined to be thwarted by Providence and sustained by purgation. The subtext is rather startling, the Eucharistic participation in the sufferings of Christ are echoed in the restoration that can only be experienced in sickness. The stark imagery that is saturated with dying puts the lie to the modern mythology of living. While the truth that Eliot explores in East Coker IV might seem morbid, it is precisely the kind of mercy we need because it meets us in the disappointments of this life and forces us to look at them as integral to the process of being made whole. This is reminiscent of what Maximus the Confessor says in quoting Gregory of Nazianzus in De Ambigua, Ambigua 7, 

“But it seems to me…none of the good things of this present life can be relied on. They are short lived…That is why it seems like we are being played with. Before something can be laid hold of it flees and escapes our grasp. Yet there is purpose in all this, for when we reflect on the instability and fickleness of such things, we are led to seek refuge in the enduring things that are to come. For if life always went well, would we not become so attached to our present state, even though we know it will not last, and by deception become enslaved to pleasure? In the end we would think that our present life is the best and noblest, and forget that, being made in the image of God, we are destined for higher things.”⁶

Eliot, like Gregory and Maximus offer a powerful, painful, and gracious corrective to the vanity with which we are trained by our culture to deny. Life is transitory, and we live in a fallen order that God uses to our benefit in a subversive fashion in his economy of salvation. Only in embracing the frailty of our bodies, the defects of our souls, and even our own mortality can we view the world and all of its discontents as the hospital where God shows forth his paternal love by pointing us to Good Friday, and to the Eucharistic meal. In the Passion, Christ brings us anew into this world, our hospital, so that we grow sick of its flaccid mythologies and begin to be healed. The “frigid purgatorial fires” are offered to us as the means to participate, by dispossession, in his life.

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